'Our Democracy is in Danger of Being Paralyzed'

[Guest guest]

The misinformation rampant in our societies dominates the majority's beliefs and

covers most areas of our lives, from the food we eat, to our beliefs on

medicine, work, government, etc.

 

Our world is dominated by common knowledge that isn't common nor is it real

knowledge, but misinformation manufactured by special interests to get you to

believe something that is in their best interests but not yours.

 

The only hope that I see is the internet as it will be hard for economic and

poloitical interests to control it as it does the major media outlets. Frank

 

http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/111403E.shtml

 

'Our Democracy is in Danger of Being Paralyzed'

Keynote Address to the National Conference on Media Reform

By Bill Moyers

t r u t h o u t | Address

Saturday 08 November 2003

 

Thank you for inviting me tonight. I’m flattered to be speaking to a gathering

as high-powered as this one that’s come together with an objective as compelling

as “media reform.” I must confess, however, to a certain discomfort, shared with

other journalists, about the very term “media.” Ted Gup, who teaches journalism

at Case Western Reserve, articulated my concerns better than I could when he

wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 23, 2001)

 

that the very concept of media is insulting to some of us within the press who

find ourselves lumped in with so many disparate elements, as if everyone with a

pen, a microphone, a camera, or just a loud voice were all one and the same.

…David Broder is not Matt Drudge. “Meet the Press” is not “Temptation Island.”

And I am not Jerry Springer. I do not speak for him. He does not speak for me.

Yet ‘the media” speaks for us all.

 

That’s how I felt when I saw Oliver North reporting on Fox from Iraq, pressing

our embattled troops to respond to his repetitive and belittling question, “Does

Fox Rock? Does Fox Rock?” Oliver North and I may be in the same “media” but we

are not part of the same message. Nonetheless, I accept that I work and all of

us live in “medialand,” and God knows we need some “media reform.” I’m sure you

know those two words are really an incomplete description of the job ahead.

Taken alone, they suggest that you’ve assembled a convention of efficiency

experts, tightening the bolts and boosting the output of the machinery of public

enlightenment, or else a conclave of high-minded do-gooders applauding each

other’s sermons. But we need to be – and we will be – much more than that.

Because what we’re talking about is nothing less than rescuing a democracy that

is so polarized it is in danger of being paralyzed and pulverized.

 

Alarming words, I know. But the realities we face should trigger alarms. Free

and responsible government by popular consent just can’t exist without an

informed public. That’s a cliché, I know, but I agree with the presidential

candidate who once said that truisms are true and clichés mean what they say (an

observation that no doubt helped to lose him the election.) It’s a reality:

democracy can’t exist without an informed public. Here’s an example: Only 13% of

eligible young people cast ballots in the last presidential election. A recent

National Youth Survey revealed that only half of the fifteen hundred young

people polled believe that voting is important, and only 46% think they can make

a difference in solving community problems. We’re talking here about one quarter

of the electorate. The Carnegie Corporation conducted a youth challenge quiz of

l5-24 year-olds and asked them, “Why don’t more young people vote or get

involved?” Of the nearly two thousand respondents, the main

answer was that they did not have enough information about issues and

candidates. Let me rewind and say it again: democracy can’t exist without an

informed public. So I say without qualification that it’s not simply the cause

of journalism that’s at stake today, but the cause of American liberty itself.

As Tom Paine put it, “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth.” He was

talking about the cause of a revolutionary America in 1776. But that revolution

ran in good part on the energies of a rambunctious, though tiny press. Freedom

and freedom of communications were birth-twins in the future United States. They

grew up together, and neither has fared very well in the other’s absence. Boom

times for the one have been boom times for the other.

 

Yet today, despite plenty of lip service on every ritual occasion to freedom

of the press radio and TV, three powerful forces are undermining that very

freedom, damming the streams of significant public interest news that irrigate

and nourish the flowering of self-determination. The first of these is the

centuries-old reluctance of governments – even elected governments – to operate

in the sunshine of disclosure and criticism. The second is more subtle and more

recent. It’s the tendency of media giants, operating on big-business principles,

to exalt commercial values at the expense of democratic value. That is, to run

what Edward R. Murrow forty-five years ago called broadcasting’s “money-making

machine” at full throttle. In so doing they are squeezing out the journalism

that tries to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth; they are

isolating serious coverage of public affairs into ever-dwindling “news holes” or

far from prime- time; and they are gobbling up small and

independent publications competing for the attention of the American people.

 

It’s hardly a new or surprising story. But there are fresh and disturbing

chapters.

 

In earlier times our governing bodies tried to squelch journalistic freedom

with the blunt instruments of the law – padlocks for the presses and jail cells

for outspoken editors and writers. Over time, with spectacular wartime

exceptions, the courts and the Constitution struck those weapons out of their

hands. But they’ve found new ones now, in the name of “national security.” The

classifier’s Top Secret stamp, used indiscriminately, is as potent a silencer as

a writ of arrest. And beyond what is officially labeled “secret” there hovers a

culture of sealed official lips, opened only to favored media insiders: of

government by leak and innuendo and spin, of misnamed “public information”

offices that churn out blizzards of releases filled with self-justifying

exaggerations and, occasionally, just plain damned lies. Censorship without

officially appointed censors.

 

Add to that the censorship-by-omission of consolidated media empires digesting

the bones of swallowed independents, and you’ve got a major shrinkage of the

crucial information that thinking citizens can act upon. People saw that coming

as long as a century ago when the rise of chain newspaper ownerships, and then

of concentration in the young radio industry, became apparent. And so in the

zesty progressivism of early New Deal days, the Federal Communications Act of

1934 was passed (more on this later.) The aim of that cornerstone of broadcast

policy, mentioned over 100 times in its pages, was to promote the “public

interest, convenience and necessity.” The clear intent was to prevent a monopoly

of commercial values from overwhelming democratic values – to assure that the

official view of reality – corporate or government – was not the only view of

reality that reached the people. Regulators and regulated, media and government

were to keep a wary eye on each other, preserving those

checks and balances that is the bulwark of our Constitutional order.

 

What would happen, however, if the contending giants of big government and big

publishing and broadcasting ever joined hands? Ever saw eye to eye in putting

the public’s need for news second to free-market economics? That’s exactly

what’s happening now under the ideological banner of “deregulation.” Giant

megamedia conglomerates that our founders could not possibly have envisioned are

finding common cause with an imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce

not the sons and daughters of liberty but the very kind of bastards that issued

from the old arranged marriage of church and state.

 

Consider where we are today.

 

Never has there been an administration so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely

in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and – in defiance of

the Constitution – from their representatives in Congress. Never has the so

powerful a media oligopoly – the word is Barry Diller’s, not mine – been so

unabashed in reaching like Caesar for still more wealth and power. Never have

hand and glove fitted together so comfortably to manipulate free political

debate, sow contempt for the idea of government itself, and trivialize the

people’s need to know. When the journalist-historian Richard Reeves was once

asked by a college student to define “real news”, he answered: “The news you and

I need to keep our freedoms.” When journalism throws in with power that’s the

first news marched by censors to the guillotine. The greatest moments in the

history of the press came not when journalists made common cause with the state

but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.

 

Which brings me to the third powerful force – beyond governmental secrecy and

megamedia conglomerates – that is shaping what Americans see, read, and hear. I

am talking now about that quasi-official partisan press ideologically linked to

an authoritarian administration that in turn is the ally and agent of the most

powerful interests in the world. This convergence dominates the marketplace of

political ideas today in a phenomenon unique in our history. You need not harbor

the notion of a vast, right wing conspiracy to think this more collusion more

than pure coincidence. Conspiracy is unnecessary when ideology hungers for power

and its many adherents swarm of their own accord to the same pot of honey.

Stretching from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to the faux news

of Rupert Murdoch’s empire to the nattering nabobs of no-nothing radio to a

legion of think tanks paid for and bought by conglomerates – the religious,

partisan and corporate right have raised a mighty

megaphone for sectarian, economic, and political forces that aim to transform

the egalitarian and democratic ideals embodied in our founding documents.

Authoritarianism. With no strong opposition party to challenge such triumphalist

hegemony, it is left to journalism to be democracy’s best friend. That is why so

many journalists joined with you in questioning Michael Powell’s bid – blessed

by the White House – to permit further concentration of media ownership. If free

and independent journalism committed to telling the truth without fear or favor

is suffocated, the oxygen goes out of democracy. And there is a surer way to

intimidate and then silence mainstream journalism than to be the boss.

 

If you doubt me, read Jane Kramer’s chilling account in the current New Yorker

of Silvio Berlusconi. The Prime Minister of Italy is its richest citizen. He is

also its first media mogul. The list of media that he or his relatives or his

proxies own, or directly or indirectly control, includes the state television

networks and radio stations, three of Italy’s four commercial television

networks, two big publishing houses, two national newspapers, fifty magazines,

the country’s largest movie production-and-distribution company, and a chunk of

its Internet services. Even now he is pressing upon parliament a law that would

enable him to purchase more media properties, including the most influential

paper in the country. Kramer quotes one critic who says that half the reporters

in Italy work for Berlusconi, and the other half think they might have to. Small

wonder he has managed to put the Italian State to work to guarantee his fortune

– or that his name is commonly attached to such

unpleasant things as contempt for the law, conflict of interest, bribery, and

money laundering. Nonetheless, “his power over what other Italians see, read,

buy, and, above all, think, is overwhelming.” The editor of The Economist, Bill

Emmott, was asked recently why a British magazine was devoting so much space to

an Italian Prime Minister. He replied that Berlusconi had betrayed the two

things the magazine stood for: capitalism and democracy. Can it happen here? It

can happen here. By the way, Berlusconi’s close friend is Rupert Murdoch. On

July 3lst this year, writes Jane Kramer, programming on nearly all the satellite

hookups in Italy was switched automatically to Murdoch’s Sky Italia

 

So the issues bringing us here tonight are bigger and far more critical than

simply “media reform.” That’s why, before I go on, I want to ask you to look

around you. I’m serious: Look to your left and now to your right. You are

looking at your allies in one of the great ongoing struggles of the American

experience – the struggle for the soul of democracy, for government “of, by, and

for the people.”

 

It’s a battle we can win only if we work together. We’ve seen that this year.

Just a few months ago the FCC, heavily influenced by lobbyists for the

newspaper, broadcasting and cable interests, prepared a relaxation of the rules

governing ownership of media outlets that would allow still more

diversity-killing mergers among media giants. The proceedings were conducted in

virtual secrecy, and generally ignored by all the major media, who were of

course interested parties. In June Chairman Powell and his two Republican

colleagues on the FCC announced the revised regulations as a done deal.

 

But they didn’t count on the voice of independent journalists and citizens

like you. Because of coverage in independent outlets – including PBS, which was

the only broadcasting system that encouraged its journalists to report what was

really happening – and because citizens like you took quick action, this largely

invisible issue burst out as a major political cause and ignited a crackling

public debate. You exposed Powell’s failure to conduct an open discussion of the

rule changes save for a single hearing in Richmond, Virginia. Your efforts led

to a real participatory discussion, with open meetings in Chicago, Seattle, San

Francisco, New York and Atlanta. Then the organizing that followed generated

millions of letters and “filings”at the FCC opposing the change. Finally, the

outcry mobilized unexpected support for bi-partisan legislation to reverse the

new rules that cleared the Senate – although House Majority Leader Tom De Lay

still holds it prisoner in the House. But who would

have thought six months ago that the cause would win support from such allies

as Senator Trent Lott or Kay Bailey Hutchinson, from my own Texas. You have

moved “media reform” to center-stage, where it may even now become a catalyst

for a new era of democratic renewal.

 

We working journalists have something special to bring to this work. This

weekend at your conference there will be plenty of good talk about the mechanics

of reform. What laws are needed? What advocacy programs and strategies? How can

we protect and extend the reach of those tools that give us some countervailing

power against media monopoly – instruments like the Internet, cable TV,

community-based radio and public broadcasting systems, alternative journals of

news and opinion.

 

But without passion, without a message that has a beating heart, these won’t

be enough. There’s where journalism comes in. It isn’t the only agent of

freedom, obviously; in fact, journalism is a deeply human and therefore deeply

flawed craft – yours truly being a conspicuous example. But at times it has

risen to great occasions, and at times it has made other freedoms possible.

That’s what the draftsmen of the First Amendment knew and it’s what we can’t

afford to forget. So to remind us of what our free press has been at its best

and can be again, I will call on the help of unseen presences, men and women of

journalism’s often checkered but sometimes courageous past.

 

Think with me for a moment on the reasons behind the establishment of press

freedom. It wasn’t ordained to protect hucksters, and it didn’t drop like the

gentle rain from heaven. It was fought and sacrificed for by unpretentious but

feisty craftsmen who got their hands inky at their own hand presses and called

themselves simply “printers.” The very first American newspaper was a little

three-page affair put out in Boston in September of 1690. Its name was Publick

Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick and its editor was Benjamin Harris, who

said he simply wanted “to give an account of such considerable things as have

come to my attention.” The government shut it down after one issue – just one

issue! – for the official reason that printer Ben Harris hadn’t applied for the

required government license to publish. But I wonder if some Massachusetts

pooh-bah didn’t take personally one of Harris’s proclaimed motives for starting

the paper – “to cure the spirit of Lying much among us”?

 

No one seems to have objected when Harris and his paper disappeared – that was

the way things were. But some forty-odd years later when printer John Peter

Zenger was jailed in New York for criticizing its royal governor, things were

different. The colony brought Zenger to trial on a charge of “seditious libel,”

and since it didn’t matter whether the libel was true or not, the case seemed

open and shut. But the jury ignored the judge’s charge and freed Zenger, not

only because the governor was widely disliked, but because of the closing appeal

of Zenger’s lawyer, Andrew Hamilton. Just hear him! His client’s case was:

 

Not the cause of the poor Printer, nor of New York alone, [but] the cause of

Liberty, and. . . every Man who prefers Freedom to a Life of Slavery will bless

and honour You, as Men who. . .by an impartial and uncorrupt Verdict, [will]

have laid a Noble Foundation for securing to ourselves, our Posterity and our

Neighbors, That, to which Nature and the Laws of our Country have given us a

Right, -- the Liberty – both of exposing and opposing arbitrary Power…by

speaking and writing – Truth.

 

Still a pretty good mission statement!

 

During the War for Independence itself most of the three dozen little weekly

newspapers in the colonies took the Patriot side and mobilized resistance by

giving space to anti-British letters, news of Parliament’s latest outrages, and

calls to action. But the clarion journalistic voice of the Revolution was the

onetime editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, Tom Paine, a penniless recent

immigrant from England where he left a trail of failure as a businessman and

husband. In 1776 – just before enlisting in Washington’s army – he published

Common Sense, a hard-hitting pamphlet that slashed through legalisms and doubts

to make an uncompromising case for an independent and republican America. It’s

been called the first best seller, with as many as 100,000 copies bought by a

small literate population. Paine followed it up with another convincing

collection of essays written in the field and given another punchy title, The

Crisis. Passed from hand to hand and reprinted in other papers, they

spread the gospel of freedom to thousands of doubters. And why I bring Paine up

here is because he had something we need to restore – an unwavering

concentration to reach ordinary people with the message that they mattered and

could stand up for themselves. He couched his gospel of human rights and

equality in a popular style that any working writer can envy. “As it is my

design,” he said, “to make those that can scarcely read understand, I shall

therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in language as plain as the

alphabet.”

 

That plain language spun off memorable one-liners that we’re still quoting.

“These are the times that try men’s souls.” “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily

conquered.” “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.” “Virtue is not

hereditary.” And this: “Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the

sight of God than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.” I don’t know what

Paine would have thought of political debate by bumper sticker and sound bite

but he could have held his own in any modern campaign.

 

There were also editors who felt responsible to audiences that would dive

deep. In 1787 and ‘88 the little New-York Independent Advertiser ran all

eighty-five numbers of The Federalist , those serious essays in favor of

ratifying the Constitution. They still shine as clear arguments, but they are,

and they were, unforgiving in their demand for concentrated attention.

Nonetheless, The Advertiser felt that it owed the best to its readers, and the

readers knew that the issues of self-government deserved their best attention. I

pray your goal of “media reform” includes a press as conscientious as the

New-York Advertiser, as pungent as Common Sense, and as public-spirited as both.

Because it takes those qualities to fight against the relentless pressure of

authority and avarice. Remember, back in l79l, when the First Amendment was

ratified, the idea of a free press seemed safely sheltered in law. It wasn’t.

Only seven years later, in the midst of a war scare with France, Congress passed

and John Adams signed the infamous Sedition Act. The act made it a crime – just

listen to how broad a brush the government could swing – to circulate opinions

“tending to induce a belief” that lawmakers might have unconstitutional or

repressive motives, or “directly or indirectly tending” to justify France or to

“criminate,” whatever that meant, the President or other Federal officials. No

wonder that opponents called it a scheme to “excite a fervor against foreign

aggression only to establish tyranny at home.” John Ashcroft would have loved

it.

 

But here’s what happened. At least a dozen editors refused to be frightened

and went defiantly to prison, some under state prosecutions. One of them,

Matthew Lyon, who also held a seat in the House of Representatives, languished

for four months in an unheated cell during a Vermont winter. But such was the

spirit of liberty abroad in the land that admirers chipped in to pay his

thousand-dollar fine, and when he emerged his district re-elected him by a

landslide. Luckily, the Sedition Act had a built-in expiration date of 1801, at

which time President Jefferson – who hated it from the first – pardoned those

remaining under indictment. So the story has an upbeat ending, and so can ours,

but it will take the kind of courage that those early printers and their readers

showed.

 

Courage is a timeless quality and surfaces when the government is tempted to

hit the bottle of censorship again during national emergencies, real or

manufactured. As so many of you will recall, in 1971, during the Vietnam War,

the Nixon administration resurrected the doctrine of “prior restraint” from the

crypt and tried to ban the publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York

Times and the Washington Post – even though the documents themselves were a

classified history of events during four earlier Presidencies. Arthur

Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, and Katherine Graham of the Post were

both warned by their lawyers that they and their top managers could face

criminal prosecution under espionage laws if they printed the material that

Daniel Ellsberg had leaked – and, by the way, offered without success to the

three major television networks. Or at the least, punitive lawsuits or whatever

political reprisals a furious Nixon team could devise. But after internal

debates

– and the threats of some of their best-known editors to resign rather than

fold under pressure – both owners gave the green light – and were vindicated by

the Supreme Court. Score a round for democracy.

 

Bi-partisan fairness requires me to note that the Carter administration, in

1979, tried to prevent the Progressive magazine, published right here in

Madison, from running an article called “How to Make an H-Bomb.” The grounds

were a supposed threat to “national security.” But Howard Morland had compiled

the piece entirely from sources open to the public, mainly to show that much of

the classification system was Wizard of Oz smoke and mirrors. The courts again

rejected the government’s claim, but it’s noteworthy that the journalism of

defiance by that time had retreated to a small left-wing publication like the

Progressive.

 

In all three of those cases, confronted with a clear and present danger of

punishment, none of the owners flinched. Can we think of a single executive of

today’s big media conglomerates showing the kind of resistance that Sulzberger,

Graham, and Erwin Knoll did? Certainly not Michael Eisner. He said he didn’t

even want ABC News reporting on its parent company, Disney. Certainly not

General Electric/NBC’s Robert Wright. He took Phil Donahue off MNBC because the

network didn’t want to offend conservatives with a liberal sensibility during

the invasion of Iraq. Instead, NBC brought to its cable channel one Michael

Savage whose diatribes on radio had described non-white countries as “turd-world

nations” and who characterized gay men and women as part of “the grand plan to

cut down on the white race.” I am not sure what it says that the GE/NBC

executives calculated that while Donahue was offensive to conservatives, Savage

was not.

 

And then there’s Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS. In the very week that

the once-Tiffany Network was celebrating its 75th anniversary – and taking kudos

for its glory days when it was unafraid to broadcast “The Harvest of Shame” and

“The Selling of the Pentagon” – the network’s famous eye blinked. Pressured by a

vociferous and relentless right wing campaign and bullied by the Republican

National Committee – and at a time when its parent company has billions resting

on whether the White House, Congress, and the FCC will allow it to own even more

stations than currently permissible – CBS caved in and pulled the miniseries

about Ronald Reagan that conservatives thought insufficiently worshipful. The

chief honcho at CBS, Les Moonves, says taste, not politics, dictated his

decision. But earlier this year, explaining why CBS intended to air a series

about Adolf Hitler, Moonves sang a different tune: “If you want to play it safe

and put on milquetoast then you get criticized…There are

times when as a broadcaster when you take chances.” This obviously wasn’t one

of those times. Granted, made-for-television movies about living figures are

about as vital as the wax figures at Madame Tussaud’s – and even less authentic

– granted that the canonizers of Ronald Reagan hadn’t even seen the film before

they set to howling; granted, on the surface it’s a silly tempest in a teapot;

still, when a once-great network falls obsequiously to the ground at the feet of

a partisan mob over a cheesy mini-series that practically no one would have

taken seriously as history, you have to wonder if the slight tremor that just

ran through the First Amendment could be the harbinger of greater earthquakes to

come, when the stakes are really high. And you have to wonder what concessions

the media tycoons-cum-supplicants are making when no one is looking.

 

So what must we devise to make the media safe for individuals stubborn about

protecting freedom and serving the truth? And what do we all – educators,

administrators, legislators and agitators – need to do to restore the

disappearing diversity of media opinions? America had plenty of that in the

early days when the republic and the press were growing up together. It took no

great amount of capital and credit – just a few hundred dollars – to start a

paper, especially with a little political sponsorship and help. There were well

over a thousand of them by 1840, mostly small-town weeklies. And they weren’t

objective by any stretch. Here’s William Cobbett, another Anglo-American

hell-raiser like Paine, shouting his creed in the opening number of his 1790s

paper, Porcupine’s Gazette. “Peter Porcupine,” Cobbett’s self-bestowed nickname,

declared:

 

Professions of impartiality I shall make none. They are always useless, and are

besides perfect nonsense, when used by a newsmonger; for, he that does not

relate news as he finds it, is something worse than partial; and . . . he that

does not exercise his own judgment, either in admitting or rejecting what is

sent him, is a poor passive tool, and not an editor.

 

In Cobbett’s day you could flaunt your partisan banners as you cut and thrust,

and not inflict serious damage on open public discussion because there were

plenty of competitors. It didn’t matter if the local gazette presented the day’s

events entirely through a Democratic lens. There was always an alternate Whig or

Republican choice handy – there were, in other words, choices. As Alexis de

Tocqueville noted, these many blooming journals kept even rural Americans

amazingly well informed. They also made it possible for Americans to exercise

one of their most democratic habits – that of forming associations to carry out

civic enterprises. And they operated against the dreaded tyranny of the majority

by letting lonely thinkers know that they had allies elsewhere. Here’s how de

Tocqueville put it in his own words:

 

It often happens in democratic countries that many men who have the desire or

directed toward that light, and those wandering spirits who had long sought each

other the need to associate cannot do it, because all being very small and lost

in the crowd, they do not see each other and do not know where to find each

other. Up comes a newspaper that exposes to their view the sentiment or the idea

that had been presented to each of them simultaneously but separately. All are

immediately in the shadows finally meet each other and unite.

 

No wandering spirit could fail to find a voice in print. And so in that

pre-Civil War explosion of humanitarian reform movements, it was a diverse press

that put the yeast in freedom’s ferment. Of course there were plenty of papers

that spoke for Indian-haters, immigrant-bashers, bigots, jingoes and

land-grabbers proclaiming America’s Manifest Destiny to dominate North America.

But one way or another, journalism mattered, and had purpose and direction.

 

Past and present are never as separate as we think. Horace Greeley, the

reform-loving editor of the New York Tribune, not only kept his pages “ever open

to the plaints of the wronged and suffering,” but said that whoever sat in an

editor’s chair and didn’t work to promote human progress hadn’t tasted “the

luxury” of journalism. I liken that to the words of a kindred spirit closer to

our own time, I.F. Stone. In his four-page little I.F. Stone’s Weekly, “Izzy”

loved to catch the government’s lies and contradictions in the government’s own

official documents. And amid the thunder of battle with the reactionaries, he

said: “I have so much fun I ought to be arrested.” Think about that. Two

newsmen, a century apart, believing that being in a position to fight the good

fight isn’t a burden but a lucky break. How can our work here bring that

attitude back into the newsrooms?

 

That era of a wide-open and crowded newspaper playing field began to fade as

the old hand-presses gave way to giant machines with press runs and readerships

in the hundreds of thousands and costs in the millions. But that didn’t

necessarily or immediately kill public spirited journalism. Not so long as the

new owners were still strong-minded individuals with big professional egos to

match their thick pocketbooks. When Joseph Pulitzer, a one-time immigrant

reporter for a German-language paper in St. Louis, took over the New York World

in 1883 he was already a millionaire in the making. But here’s his recommended

short platform for politicians:

 

1.Tax luxuries

 

2. Tax Inheritances

 

3. Tax Large Incomes

 

4. Tax monopolies

 

5. Tax the Privileged Corporation

 

6. A Tariff for Revenue

 

7. Reform the Civil Service

 

8. Punish Corrupt Officers

 

9. Punish Vote Buying.

 

10. Punish Employers who Coerce their Employees in Elections

 

Also not a bad mission statement. Can you imagine one of today’s huge

newspaper chains taking that on as an agenda?

 

Don’t get me wrong. The World certainly offered people plenty of the spice

that they wanted – entertainment, sensation, earthy advice on living – but not

at the expense of news that let them know who was on their side against the

boodlers and bosses.

 

Nor did big-time, big-town, big bucks journalism extinguish the possibility of

a reform-minded investigative journalism that took the name of muckraking during

the Progressive Era. Those days of early last century saw a second great

awakening of the democratic impulse. What brought it into being was a reaction

against the Social Darwinism and unrestrained capitalistic exploitation that is

back in full force today. Certain popular magazines made space for – and

profited by – the work of such journalists – to name only a few – as Lincoln

Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Samuel Hopkins Adams and David Graham

Phillips. They ripped the veils from – among other things – the shame of the

cities, the crimes of the trusts, the treason of the Senate and the villainies

of those who sold tainted meat and poisonous medicines. And why were they given

those opportunities? Because, in the words of Samuel S. McClure, owner of

McClure’s Magazine, when special interests defied the law and

flouted the general welfare, there was a social debt incurred. And, as he put

it: “We have to pay in the end, every one of us. And in the end, the sum total

of the debt will be our liberty.”

 

Muckraking lingers on today, but alas, a good deal of it consists of raking

personal and sexual scandal in high and celebrated places. Surely, if democracy

is to be served, we have to get back to putting the rake where the important

dirt lies, in the fleecing of the public and the abuse of its faith in good

government.

 

When that landmark Communications Act of 1934 was under consideration a

vigorous public movement of educators, labor officials, and religious and

institutional leaders emerged to argue for a broadcast system that would serve

the interests of citizens and communities. A movement like that is coming to

life again and we now have to build on this momentum.

 

It won’t be easy, because the tide’s been flowing the other way for a long

time. The deregulation pressure began during the Reagan era, when then-FCC

chairman Mark Fowler, who said that TV didn’t need much regulation because it

was just a “toaster with pictures,” eliminated many public-interest rules. That

opened the door for networks to cut their news staffs, scuttle their documentary

units (goodbye to “The Harvest of Shame” and “The Selling of the Pentagon”), and

exile investigative producers and reporters to the under-funded hinterlands of

independent production. It was like turning out searchlights on dark and

dangerous corners. A crowning achievement of that drive was the

Telecommunications Act of 1996, the largest corporate welfare program ever for

the most powerful media and entertainment conglomerates in the world – passed, I

must add, with support from both parties.

 

And the beat of “convergence” between once-distinct forms of media goes on at

increased tempo, with the communications conglomerates and the advertisers

calling the tune. As safeguards to competition fall, an octopus like

GE-NBC-Vivendi-Universal will be able to secure cable channels that can deliver

interactive multimedia content – text, sound and images – to digital TVs, home

computers, personal video recorders and portable wireless devices like cell

phones. The goal? To corner the market on new ways of selling more things to

more people for more hours in the day. And in the long run, to fill the airwaves

with customized pitches to you and your children. That will melt down the

surviving boundaries between editorial and marketing divisions and create a

hybrid known to the new-media hucksters as “branded entertainment.”

 

Let’s consider what’s happening to newspapers. A study by Mark Cooper of the

Consumer Federation of America reports that two-thirds of today’s newspaper

markets are monopolies. And now most of the country’s powerful newspaper chains

are lobbying for co-ownership of newspaper and broadcast outlets in the same

market, increasing their grip on community after community. And are they

up-front about it? Hear this: Last December 3 such media giants as The New York

Times, Gannett, Cox, and Tribune, along with the trade group representing almost

all the country’s broadcasting stations, filed a petition to the FCC making the

case for that cross ownership the owners so desperately seek. They actually told

the FCC that lifting the regulation on cross ownership would strengthen local

journalism. But did those same news organizations tell their readers what they

were doing? Not all. None of them on that day believed they had an obligation to

report in their own news pages what their parent

companies were asking of the FCC. As these huge media conglomerates increase

their control over what we see, read, and hear, they rarely report on how they

are themselves are using their power to further their own interests and power as

big business, including their influence over the political process.

 

Take a look at a new book called Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate

Newspapering published as part of the Project on the State of the American

Newspaper under the auspices of the Pew Charitable Trusts. The people who

produced the book all love newspapers – Gene Roberts, former managing editor of

The New York Times; Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of

Journalism; Charles Layton, a veteran wire service reporter and news and feature

editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as contributors such as Ken

Auletta, Geneva Overholser, and Roy Reed. Their conclusion: the newspaper

industry is in the middle of the most momentous change in its three hundred year

history – a change that is diminishing the amount of real news available to the

consumer. A generation of relentless corporatization is now culminating in a

furious, unprecedented blitz of buying, selling and consolidating of newspapers,

from the mightiest dailies to the humblest weeklies. It is a world

where “small hometown dailies in particular are being bought and sold like hog

futures. Where chains, once content to grow one property at a time, now devour

other chains whole. Where they are effectively ceding whole regions of the

country to one another, further minimizing competition. Where money is pouring

into the business from interests with little knowledge and even less concern

about the special obligations newspapers have to democracy.” They go on to

describe the toll that the never-ending drive for profits is taking on the news.

In Cumberland, Maryland, for example, the police reporter had so many duties

piled upon him he no longer had time to go to the police station for the daily

reports. But newspaper management had a cost-saving solution: put a fax machine

in the police station and let the cops send over the news they thought the paper

should have. In New Jersey, the Gannett chain bought the Asbury Park Press, then

sent in a publisher who slashed fifty five people from

the staff and cut the space for news, and was rewarded by being named Gannett’s

Manager of the Year. In New Jersey, by the way, the Newhouse and Gannett chains

between them now own thirteen of the state’s nineteen dailies, or seventy three

percent of all the circulation of New Jersey-based papers. Then there is The

Northwestern in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with a circulation of 23,500. Here, the

authors report, is a paper that prided itself on being in hometown hands since

the Johnson administration – the Andrew Johnson administration. But in 1998 it

was sold not once but twice, within the space of two months. Two years later it

was sold again: four owners in less than three years.

 

You’d better get used to it, concluded Leaving Readers Behind, because the

real momentum of consolidation is just beginning – it won’t be long now before

America is reduced to half a dozen major print conglomerates.

 

You can see the results even now in the waning of robust journalism. In the

dearth of in-depth reporting as news organizations try to do more with fewer

resources. In the failure of the major news organizations to cover their own

corporate deals and lobbying as well as other forms of “crime in the suites”

such as Enron story. And in helping people understand what their government is

up to. The report by the Roberts team includes a survey in l999 that showed a

wholesale retreat in coverage of nineteen key departments and agencies in

Washington. Regular reporting of the Supreme Court and State Department dropped

off considerably through the decade. At the Social Security Administration,

whose activities literally affect every American, only the New York Times was

maintaining a full-time reporter and, incredibly, at the Interior Department,

which controls five to six hundred million acres of public land and looks after

everything from the National Park Service to the Bureau of Indian

Affairs, there were no full-time reporters around.

 

That’s in Washington, our nation’s capital. Out across the country there is

simultaneously a near blackout of local politics by broadcasters. The public

interest group Alliance for Better Campaigns studied forty-five stations in six

cities in one week in October. Out of 7,560 hours of programming analyzed, only

13 were devoted to local public affairs – less than one-half of 1% of local

programming nationwide. Mayors, town councils, school boards, civic leaders get

no time from broadcasters who have filled their coffers by looting the public

airwaves over which they were placed as stewards. Last year, when a movement

sprang up in the House of Representatives to require these broadcasters to obey

the law that says they must sell campaign advertising to candidates for office

at the lowest commercial rate, the powerful broadcast lobby brought the Congress

to heel. So much for the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.”

 

So what do we do? What is our strategy for taking on what seems a hopeless

fight for a media system that serves as effectively as it sells – one that holds

all the institutions of society, itself included, accountable?

 

There’s plenty we can do. Here’s one journalist’s list of some of the

overlapping and connected goals that a vital media reform movement might pursue.

 

First, we have to take Tom Paine’s example – and Danny Schecter’s advice – and

reach out to regular citizens. We have to raise an even bigger tent than you

have here. Those of us in this place speak a common language about the “media.”

We must reach the audience that’s not here – carry the fight to radio talk

shows, local television, and the letters columns of our newspapers. As Danny

says, we must engage the mainstream, not retreat from it. We have to get our

fellow citizens to understand that what they see, hear, and read is not only the

taste of programmers and producers but also a set of policy decisions made by

the people we vote for.

 

We have to fight to keep the gates to the Internet open to all. The web has

enabled many new voices in our democracy – and globally – to be heard: advocacy

groups, artists, individuals, non-profit organizations. Just about anyone can

speak online, and often with an impact greater than in the days when orators had

to climb on soap box in a park. The media industry lobbyists point to the

Internet and say it’s why concerns about media concentration are ill founded in

an environment where anyone can speak and where there are literally hundreds of

competing channels. What those lobbyists for big media don’t tell you is that

the traffic patterns of the online world are beginning to resemble those of

television and radio. In one study, for example, AOL Time Warner (as it was then

known) accounted for nearly a third of all user time spent online. And two

others companies – and Microsoft – bring that figure to fully 50%. As for

the growing number of channels available on today’s cable

systems, most are owned by a small handful of companies. Of the ninety-one

major networks that appear on most cable systems, 79 are part of such multiple

network groups such as Time Warner, Viacom, Liberty Media, NBC, and Disney. In

order to program a channel on cable today, you must either be owned by or

affiliated with one of the giants. If we’re not vigilant the wide-open spaces of

the Internet could be transformed into a system in which a handful of companies

use their control over high-speed access to ensure they remain at the top of the

digital heap in the broadband era at the expense of the democratic potential of

this amazing technology. So we must fight to make sure the Internet remains open

to all as the present-day analogue of that many-tongued world of small

newspapers so admired by de Tocqueville.

 

We must fight for a regulatory, market and public opinion environment that

lets local and community-based content be heard rather than drowned out by

nationwide commercial programming.

 

We must fight to limit conglomerate swallowing of media outlets by sensible

limits on multiple and cross-ownership of TV and radio stations, newspapers,

magazines, publishing companies and other information sources. Let the message

go forth: No Berlusconis in America!

 

We must fight to expand a noncommercial media system – something made possible

in part by new digital spectrum awarded to PBS stations – and fight off attempts

to privatize what’s left of public broadcasting. Commercial speech must not be

the only free speech in America!

 

We must fight to create new opportunities, through public policies and private

agreements, to let historically marginalized media players into more ownership

of channels and control of content.

 

Let us encourage traditional mainstream journalism to get tougher about

keeping a critical eye on those in public and private power and keeping us all

informed of what’s important – not necessarily simple or entertaining or good

for the bottom line. Not all news is “Entertainment Tonight.” And news

departments are trustees of the public, not the corporate media’s stockholders

 

In that last job, schools of journalism and professional news associations

have their work cut out. We need journalism graduates who are not only better

informed in a whole spectrum of special fields – and the schools do a competent

job there – but who take from their training a strong sense of public service.

And also graduates who are perhaps a little more hard-boiled and street-smart

than the present crop, though that’s hard to teach. Thanks to the high cost of

education, we get very few recruits from the ranks of those who do the world’s

unglamorous and low-paid work. But as a onetime “cub” in a very different kind

of setting, I cherish H.L. Mencken’s description of what being a young Baltimore

reporter a hundred years ago meant to him. “I was at large,” he wrote,

 

in a wicked seaport of half a million people with a front seat at every public

.. . y all orthodox cultural standards I probably reached my all-time low, for

the heavy reading of my teens had been abandoned in favor of life itself. . .But

it would be an exaggeration to say I was ignorant, for if I neglected the

humanities I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police

lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer or a midwife.

We need some of that worldly wisdom in our newsrooms. Let’s figure out how to

attract youngsters who have acquired it.

And as for those professional associations of editors they might remember that

in union there is strength. One journalist alone can’t extract from an employer

a commitment to let editors and not accountants choose the appropriate subject

matter for coverage. But what if news councils blew the whistle on shoddy or

cowardly managements? What if foundations gave magazines such as the Columbia

Journalism Review sufficient resources to spread their stories of journalistic

bias, failure or incompetence? What if entire editorial departments simply

refused any longer to quote anonymous sources – or give Kobe Bryant’s trial more

than the minimal space it rates by any reasonable standard – or to run stories

planted by the Defense Department and impossible, for alleged security reasons,

to verify? What if a professional association backed them to the hilt? Or

required the same stance from all its members? It would take courage to confront

powerful ownerships that way. But not as much courage

as is asked of those brave journalists in some countries who face the dungeon,

the executioner or the secret assassin for speaking out.

All this may be in the domain of fantasy. And then again, maybe not. What I

know to be real is that we are in for the fight of our lives. I am not a

romantic about democracy or journalism; the writer Andre Gide may have been

right when he said that all things human, given time, go badly. But I know

journalism and democracy are deeply linked in whatever chance we human beings

have to redress our grievances, renew our politics, and reclaim our

revolutionary ideals. Those are difficult tasks at any time, and they are even

more difficult in a cynical age as this, when a deep and pervasive corruption

has settled upon the republic. But too much is at stake for our spirits to flag.

Earlier this week the Library of Congress gave the first Kluge Lifetime Award in

the Humanities to the Polish philosopher Leslie Kolakowski. In an interview

Kolakowski said: “There is one freedom on which all other liberties depend – and

that is freedom of expression, freedom of speech, of print. If this is

taken away, no other freedom can exist, or at least it would be soon

suppressed.”

That’s the flame of truth your movement must carry forward. I am older than

almost all of you and am not likely to be around for the duration; I have said

for several years now that I will retire from active journalism when I turn 70

next year. But I take heart from the presence in this room, unseen, of Peter

Zenger, Thomas Paine, the muckrakers, I.F. Stone and all those heroes and

heroines, celebrated or forgotten, who faced odds no less than ours and did not

flinch. I take heart in your presence here. It’s your fight now. Look around.

You are not alone.

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