The Media Lobby

The Media Lobby

By Alexander Lynch, AlterNet. Posted March 11, 2005.

How can the corporate media be expected to critically cover the issues its parent companies have a financial stake in?

During the Cronkite days of journalism, there were scarcely media watchdogs to dissect the messengers. Now there are varied left-wing, right-wing and centrist watchdog groups, writers who specialize in the media message and the internet, which has spawned even more critics. Stories such as Dan Rather and Eason Jordan's fall, the lack of WMDs in Iraq, the outing of Valerie Plame, the ousting of Jeff Gannon/James Guckert, the unveiling of Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher and Mike McManus. ... Questioning the journalists seems to be as partisan an issue as the journalists themselves.

But many of these stories, scandals by many accounts, even federal offenses, are often only alluded to by the mainstream media, getting more attention from late-night comics than news desks. In fact, an increasingly bigger story that has hushed the notebooks of reporters, the waxing of columnists and the demands of editorials is the story of how the media is entangled and interconnected with politicians (its supposed regulators) corporate interests and, binding them all together: lobbyists. The simple fact is, objective journalists are not supposed to be proactive on issues, which is the definition of lobbying. "It is the subject of the least journalistic scrutiny," says Peter Hart of the media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). Asking a media outlet to report on its parent company's lobbying expenditures and the goals associated with such spending, gives new meaning to "conflict of interest." Considering other options, such as one medium reporting on another's lobbying interests, would only invite scrutiny, which is called, in an economist's terms, collusion. And so the story goes unreported in mainstream media as if, it is not only unimportant, it is nonexistent.

The numbers beneath the 2003 FCC vote

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in 2000 alone, the parent companies of the big five television and cable broadcasters (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox) spent close to $27 million on lobbying firms. And that excludes the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) which spent $5.7 million the same year. According to the Center for Public Integrity, from 1998 until 2003, when the Federal Communications Commission considered another round of "relaxing" ownership regulations, "the lobbying expenditures by the broadcast industry ha(d) risen 74 percent."

In maybe the most audacious increase in lobbyist spending history, Clear Channel Communications Inc., which owns nearly 1,200 radio stations and some television stations, had a clear interest in the relaxation of media ownership rules to expand its holdings into more market areas. In 2001, Clear Channel spent only $12,000 on lobbying the government. By 2003, the year of the FCC vote, it spent $2.28 million, an increase of 19,000 percent in just two years' time. That same year, Clear Channel's CEO, Lowry Mays told Fortune magazine what he thought of the publicly owned airwaves entrusted to his company: "If anyone said we were in the radio business, it wouldn't be someone from our company. We're not in the business of providing news and information. We're not in the business of providing well-researched music. We're simply in the business of selling our customers products."

Although broadcasters generally outspend print media by a large margin, companies such as Media General (Tampa Tribune, Denver Post) and Gannett Company (Arizona Republic, USA Today), owners of mainly newspapers, saw sharp increases and each spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying expenditures in 2003, according to the Senate Office of Public Records. Both had a distinct interest in the consolidation of outlets. Gannett spent $20,000 on lobbying in 2002, but the next year it spent $220,000. Media General argued to the Supreme Court that the scarcity of ownership, which had been outlined in the Communications Act of 1934, was "obsolete" for the simple reason, and seemingly weak argument, that there had since been a "telecommunications revolution."

True, there have been great technological advances since 1934, much appreciated by a business community now able to reach many readers/listeners at once. But does that change the idea that scarcity and diversity of ownership is best for the public? So how could such flaccid reasoning have swayed so many FCC chairmen? According to comments made in the media before the vote, several commissioners were ready to allow a new round of mega-mergers of media and to change the nature, even further, of the mainstream press into an ever more homogeneous industry.

In a May, 2003 investigation, the Center for Public Integrity found that over a period of eight years, FCC commissioners had gone on some 2,500 industry-sponsored trips. Which of course means all expense paid outings for commissioners funded by lobbyists hired by the media industry. Ironically, according to FCC travel documents, Las Vegas was the most favored destination, which leads to the question: Is the media industry gambling away its objectivity?

One person who believes so is Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University and author of Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order (Norton). "The hiring of lobbyists, from any general patriotic point of view ... it's grotesque," Miller said. "No one who signed the Constitution would've been comfortable with this."

Enjoying free travel and entertainment, all paid for by the industry they are supposed to be regulating is another case of gross conflict that many felt would compromise the commissioners' vote. Apparently, some politicians were also convinced, and in September of 2003 U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), who oversaw the FCC's budget, asked Chairman Michael Powell to "end this practice."

"In this town, perception often becomes reality, so I sincerely believe it would be in the best interest of the FCC, and the American public, if the travel of FCC commissioners and staff were only through appropriated funds," Wolf said in a letter to Powell.

In the end though, it was a grassroots organization of citizens, backed by millions of e-mails sent to commissioners and politicians that turned the tide of the FCC vote against the industry.

Redefining conflict of interest
There is no scale to weigh conflicts of interest, no rate of increase/decrease. In fact, it's not even a crime. Traditionally, journalists and media who'd been exposed for having a conflict of interest, bowed to pressure in an attempt to save face. There existed a more integrity-based system of self-regulation rooted in a concern for one's reputation for objectivity.

But that conflict, more and more people are coming to believe, is no longer a motivating factor for a journalist to change his/her stance, in fact, it is now more of a systemic problem. "There is a fundamental conflict of interest afflicting American journalism," Miller said. "On the one hand, the press has a tacit constitutional obligation to inform people. On the other, publicly-traded corporations that own news are run by people who have a strict fiduciary obligation to shareholders. These two obligations are utterly opposed for many reasons."

One example of this systemic conflict is that media organizations, supposedly objective on all issues, are sharing lobbyists with companies that are very partial on issues. Imagine, if you would, a lobbyist taking a congressman on an all-expense paid outing and arguing, for instance, the need to stop cheaper drugs from being imported from Canada (or demanding government and military contracts for his/her client) and then, and in the next breath, representing the interests of the media.

No need to imagine, actually, for this scenario is no figment. In 2000, to cite only one lobbying firm, (Podesta/Mattoon) General Electric (NBC, MSNBC), Time Warner (CNN), News Corporation (Fox News Channel), Washington Post, Viacom (CBS), NAB and the Newspaper Associations of America, all shared representation with the likes of Lockheed Martin and Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America Inc. (PhRMA). Lockheed Martin has benefited greatly from the war in Iraq by dumping weapons and gaining government/military contracts to make more. And PhRMA, who coincidentally just hired Gordon Giffin, former U.S. ambassador to Canada, to lobby for them, is at the head of the industry's movement to prevent the importation of prescription drugs across the northern border.

This only scratches the surface of the combined relationships between issue oriented corporations and the media, whom the public depends on to report, not only on the companies themselves, but on the issues. ^^^^ Disney (ABC) and GE share the lobbying firm Verner, Liipfert et. al, with insurance agencies such as Aetna Inc., the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, the New York Stock Exchange, PhRMA, General Motors, the tobacco industry's Philip Morris, the richest in the banking industry Citigroup, and weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon, Harris Corp. and the infamous Carlyle Group.

News Corporation and GE also shared lobbyists in 2000 with Enron a year before its most undistinguished fall, and with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which recently has been one of the big players behind the Bush administration's plan to partially privatize Social Security. "From a pure journalistic standpoint, you'd not want a parent company involved in any of this," Hart explained. "Certainly not sharing lobbyists that are the focus of your reporting. That is the conflict that reporters need to report on, the silence on it speaks volumes. For GE and others, it makes perfect sense to get in the door at the White House. From a corporation's interest, it's good business, for journalists it's a conflict of interest."

The silence does speak volumes, and when NBC Nightly News ran a multi-night series called "The Fleecing of America," covering the duping of taxpayers and citizens on issues such as pharmacist's windfall profits from Medicare, e-commerce and internet fraud and pyramid scams, it didn't however, cover its own parent company.

General Electric, which spent twice as much more on lobbying from 1998 to 2003 than the next-closest media competitor at $105 million, has been charged under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for fraudulent accounting as the financial backer of WorldCom (the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history) and they've even defrauded the Pentagon. Despite GE's nefarious history, and more than $1 billion paid in fines, it has no problem winning government and military contracts, a.k.a. taxpayer dollars. Turning journalism on its ear, GE is the epitome of the corporate media's conflict of interest.

Miller sees this compromise of journalistic standards not as some collateral damage or unintended consequence of an ever increasing powerful media, but as a purposeful assault to frame issues by silencing public discussion: "Corporations get into news not just to make money, but because it helps determine the content of the national debate," Miller says. This is an extraordinary statement that should not be taken lightly. Put another way, the media is not so much "reporting" on the news as much as it is "influencing" how the public perceives issues. "News is essentially different from propaganda," Miller says, "People depend on a free press to provide information to defend themselves. Businesses churn out propaganda to sell things. Democracies can't function that way."

End Part I