Corporate Takeovers of the News

Hootie and the Blowfish, a new Top 40 feel-good "rock" band that oozes generic lyrics like "I always want to be with you" to monotone riffs lasting no longer than two minutes, merits a full-page photograph among the 48 glossy leaves of Time Warner's 1995 Annual Report. Hootie and his fish, a property of Time Warner's Atlantic Records label, created America's top-selling album for the previous year, gaining the obvious right to be heralded among the entertainment giant's other financial achievements, which together totaled over $3.3 billion in earnings.

Time Magazine, the standard bearer of American news magazines since 1898 and another subsidiary of Time Warner, received a half-page photo a bit later in the annual report, smaller than those of its sister publications Sports Illustrated and People. The financials section of the report, in no small coincidence, lauds revenue increases from Sports Illustrated and People in the publishing division but makes not a mention of Time. At the earnings hierarchy that is Time Warner, it doesn't matter what the subsidiary does so much as its pecuniary contribution to the parent company.

Perhaps you might think that Time Warner Chair and CEO Gerald M. Levin and his corporate comrades high up at 75 Rockefeller Plaza treat Time with kid gloves, as a special journalistic baby and--as a supposed bulwark of media integrity--one of the corner-stones of the American democracy. You would be wrong. In his letter to shareholders, Mr. Levin writes, "Our commitment is...to provide our shareholders with a consistently superior return on their investment in our company." And to that end, ethics may be conveniently misplaced.

Take, for example, the cover of Time dated May 20, 1996. A barreling tornado attacks Hodges, Tex, covered by the headline, "On the Trail of Twisters." The inside story reveals a bit more in the second paragraph: "No, this is not one of those scary scenes from the movie 'Twister,' which opened in theaters across the country last week." Hmmm, sounds like this is a major movie, and it's out just in time for the beginning of the summer season. Maybe I should go to the box office and pay my $7 to see it. After all, it's the major news event of the week and I can be part of it.

You wouldn't know it from the cover story or the movie review, but "Twister" is the most prominent release for the season of Warner Brothers, a Time Warner Entertainment Company, with a soundtrack on Warner Sunset Records, a division of Warner Music Group, and a World Wide Web Site on Pathfinder, Time Warner's ad-infested base in cyberspace. "Twister" is simply another product, albeit an important one, which will affect the health of the Time Warner entertainment octopus. Who ever said that American firms weren't cooperative? At the behest of Time Warner, the consumer is forced to experience intense marketing pressure from all arms of the parent company, even through non-commercial venues such as Time's news division, which seeks to sell its wares to a captive public.

Economic theory holds that in a perfectly competitive industry, no effort will need to be expended to sell the product. The supply will be equivalent to the demand, and the work of the market would simply be to match up buyers and sellers. Advertising, window dressing and product differentiation are all unknown to the wheat market, for instance, which is the closest thing to perfect competition in United States. Time Warner and other media conglomerates, however, see effort not simply as part of their business but as their whole business. We may conclude that they have a high degree of market, or monopoly, power which causes them to want to sell as many goods as possible, since their marginal cost of production is always less than the marginal revenue they will receive.

In fact, Time Warner, along with three other United States companies, has a vertical media monopoly. Time Warner itself controls a major motion picture studio, six publishing houses, 24 magazines, seven cable channels and eight music companies. It is about to merge with Turner Broadcasting, itself a media powerhouse centered on CNN. General Electric owns NBC network news, soon to be a comprehensive multimedia news service on MSNBC, nine television stations and more than 10 cable channels. Disney owns ABC network news, 21 ABC radio stations, 18 television stations, five motion picture studios, two publishing houses, eight cable channels, 11 newspapers and three music studios. Westing-house owns CBS network news, three cable channels, 39 radio stations and 14 television stations.

A pull-out chart in the June 3 issue of The Nation excellently highlights these tentacles of the media octopi. The accompanying article, by Mark Crispin Miller of Johns Hopkins University, credits the federal government for allowing the perpetuation of the media trusts and for permitting their pernicious effects on our culture. He writes of "the true causes of those enormous ills that now dismay so many Americans: the universal sleaze and 'dumbing down,' the flood-tide of corporate propaganda, the terminal inanity of US politics. These have arisen not from any grand decline in national character nor from the plotting of some Hebrew cabal but from the inevitable toxic influence of those few corporations that have monopolized our culture."

In other words, the "Twister" cover is only the most evident mark of the corporate control. More significant is the hollow nature of American mass journalism which allows photo-op politics and trash-talk campaign advertisements to be the focus of the evening news. When the candidates discuss "issues," the issues they discuss are marginal to the true concerns of the public. America desires an improved quality of life that it cannot have while being daily inundated with the absurd "infotainment" thrust into its citizens' homes. Children grow up literally addicted to television and to the self-debasing consumerism fostered by the media trusts. Our future is threatened as much by NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN as it is by MTV, itself the child of media giant Viacom.

What America has come to perceive as news is simply entertainment. This is why so many television and newspaper crews descended on Los Angeles for the greatest show of the decade: O.J. It surely makes little difference to the producer of NBC Nightly News whether he leads with a story about Clolin Powell or Michael Jackson, a scientific discovery (hah!) or the release of "Twister." What makes for a good news story is not how broadly or deeply it affects its audience but how interested those consumers will be to hear of it. The editor must keep throwing popcorn to his or her audience in order to keep the elephants alertly placated in front of their television cage. If the elephants get off on O.J., then give them O.J. And Kato. And bring back Nicole.

Along with the media circus that has resulted from the corporate homogenization of the journalism has come the decline of participatory democracy. The media no longer understand the ultimate flexibility of government or the wellspring of its power. Not that the individual journalists working for the major concerns are themselves evil, but they are trapped in a system that perpetuates mind mush as news. They are assigned stories that matter not in the least to the viewers or readers, that have zero impact on their daily lives. The news only serves to maintain the status quo, in which we are glued to the television while the advertising profits of media magnates skyrocket.

The American public owns the airwaves and can at least assure that freedom. With reference to the corporate print and film industries, the government can break up the media trusts that stifle freedom of speech. In any case, the American public needs to be better informed about who is controlling the sources of information that inform their daily reality. Democracy cannot function with passive citizens contented by infotainment that is propagated by media giants to further themselves and their profits. It is impossible to request that Time Warner, et al., be concerned with something other than profits--that's what a corporation is for. Rather, it is necessary that the U.S. government ensures through anti-trust initiatives the independent stewardship of the networks and the maintenance of a free press so that democracy itself is not stifled by entertainment.

Joshua A. Kaufman '98 is associate editorial chair of The Crimson.