Corporate Media Favors Incumbents (5/19/05)
by Dean Hartwell
I hear conservatives say the media is dominated by liberals. I hear liberals complain that conservatives influence the media.
What does this mean?
It means no one likes what they are hearing. And why would we? Consider the news stories the corporate media have broadcast to us in recent weeks:
The Terry Schiavo cases. It was sad to hear of a woman in a persistent vegetative state but the media overkill was obscene. It did not help that the President and his brother, the governor of Florida, weighed in on the “sanctity of life.” A better description of the situation would have been “quality of life.”
The Michael Jackson case. Just as they did with O.J. Simpson, the media has given us all of the details of a defendant and his accusers. But does it really matter to anyone else?
The Runaway Bride. A woman in Georgia ran away from getting married. She also lied to the police about getting kidnapped. Let the police take care of this situation.
Meanwhile, here are some stories that matter to us as a nation and which the media should have spent more time covering:
Coalition Provisional Authority Loses Money in Iraq. We gave money to the Provisional Authority and they cannot account for about $9 billion of it. Where is the investigative journalism on this issue. It seems as though the Provisional Authority paid for guards it could not account for (www.voanews.com/english/2005-01-31-voa15.cfm). It was not long ago that Gray Davis was recalled as governor, in part, for a multi-billion dollar deficit in California.
Smoking Gun Memo Proves Bush Manipulated Facts on Iraq Invasion. A memo of a meeting among top British officials discussing military action in Iraq in 2002 was leaked recently. The memo states that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” by the Bush Administration. Very few in the media have bothered to cover this story, which, if true, could be impeachable (www.politicalgateway.com/news/read.html?id=3712).
Teresa Heinz Kerry Calls Election Rigged. The wife of the presidential candidate told a group of Seattle guests that the election was rigged. (http://surrealist.org/prayforpeace/electiontruth.html) None of the major networks covered the allegations
It may sound like heresy or sour grapes to some, but is it really unthinkable? We know as a fact that
Bush’s team removed likely Democratic voters from the voting rolls in 2000, enough to steal that election (http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&row=1). It makes sense that Bush would steal another one. Plus, we know about problems with the voting machines in 2004 (they had no paper trail, for instance, to allow a complete recount) and the fact that exit polls showed Kerry won.
How can the corporate media (such as ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox.) miss all of these stories and annoy us with phony ones? Consider the sources: (The Walt Disney Company owns ABC, Viacom owns CBS, General Electric owns NBC and News Corporation owns Fox). The executives who make the decisions on what to air receive huge tax cuts thanks to Bush Administration policies, as do the corporations themselves.
But a survey by the Center for Public Integrity shows that the big media owners contribute heavily (over $248 million) to politicians of both major parties to lobby and to contribute to their campaigns (through Political Action Committees. President Bush received most in the reporting period, but two Democrats (John Kerry and Hillary Clinton) made the top three (http://69.20.6.242/news2004/oct04/oct25/4_thurs/news1thursday.html).
These media owners want to curry favor with whoever is in power or who may be in power to make sure their interests (namely deregulation) are represented. They cannot afford to rock the boat by running stories unfavorable to the incumbent.
So, we don’t like what we hear. It has a lot to do with the fact that there is so much that we don’t hear.