This excerpt is from an article published at Truthout.
Protecting the Shield: Why ESPN Can't Be Trusted to Cover the NFL
Sunday, 27 September 2015
By Michael Corcoran, Truthout | News Analysis
The National Football League (NFL) is not merely a sports league that helps entertain the US public. While football is just a game, the NFL is a major institutional power that uses billions of tax dollars to subsidize its owners, tries to weaken unions in courts and is potentially complicit in an increasingly disturbing mental health crisis among its workforce. In light of this, the league warrants close scrutiny and investigation from the media.
The organization that should be the most important watchdog of the league is ESPN, which as the largest sports media company in the world has the resources and reach to truly serve as a check on the league's power. Unfortunately, ESPN is too compromised to be trusted in this role. Its NFL broadcasts are worth billions, and an examination of its coverage shows that ESPN's priorities are not investigating the league, but protecting it.
In early September, Judge Richard Berman nullified the NFL's four-game suspension of famed quarterback Tom Brady. The suspension, affirmed by the league's commissioner, Roger Goodell, was for Brady's alleged role in the "Deflategate" scandal - arguably one of the most ridiculous cases in the history of US jurisprudence.
The judge ruled against the NFL on September 3 for not giving Brady a fair hearing in his appeal, and for punishing him for a rule that doesn't exist: alleged "general awareness" of an alleged equipment violation (deflating air out of a football). In two brutal hearings in open court (August 12 and August 19), Berman ripped the NFL's lack of due process and its "independent" report, aimed at rubber-stamping Goodell's "own brand of industrial justice," as Berman called it.
Read the rest at Truthout
Showing posts with label media analysis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media analysis. Show all posts
2/1/12
Uygur out at MSNBC (Extra!)
Extra! November 2011
Uygur Out at MSNBC
Another progressive show canceled for political reasons
Uygur Out at MSNBC
Another progressive show canceled for political reasons
When talkshow host Cenk Uygur announced that his short tenure at MSNBC had come to an end due to his criticism of “those in power” (Young Turks, 7/20/11), it highlighted an unsettling pattern at the channel.
Uygur’s ouster represented the third time in recent years that a show hosted by someone with progressive ideals and a willingness to challenge the status quo was canceled, despite good ratings. In January of this year Keith Olbermann, well known for his public disputes with right-wing figures, was terminated by MSNBC, just after control of the channel was sold by General Electric to Comcast (Extra!, 3/11). In 2003, during the run-up to the Iraq War, Phil Donahue (one of the few elite media members to openly oppose the invasion) was taken off the air due, a leaked memo would reveal, to his antiwar views (FAIR Action Alert, 3/7/03).
Uygur, who began hosting MSNBC Live in the 6 p.m. weeknight slot in January, said he was warned before his show was cancelled by MSNBC president Phil Griffin that his aggressive style did not reflect MSNBC’s role as a reputable establishment outlet, and that he needed to “tone it down.”
“Outsiders are cool—but we’re insiders, we’re the establishment,” Uygur says Griffin told him (Salon, 7/21/11). “There are two audiences. There is the audience you are trying to appeal to, the viewers. And there is management. And management is basically the club. And they want to make sure that you are cool—can play ball with the club.”
His bosses also told him that “people in Washington were concerned about [his] tone,” Uygur said, and even sent him notes asking him to “act more like a senator.”
Ignoring this advice, Uygur saw his ratings consistently increase; his show, he said, consistently beat its 6 p.m. competition on CNN. But ratings clearly aren’t everything at MSNBC: In June his show was axed.
MSNBC took a drastic ratings hit following the removal of Olbermann, whose replacement, Lawrence O’Donnell, lost about 35 percent of the viewers in the advertiser-coveted 25-to-54 age group. The weak lead-in ratings have also hurt Rachel Maddow’s ratings at 9 p.m., which are down 15 percent, and have put the channel “on the verge of falling back into third place among the cable news networks,” the New York Times (9/27/11) reported.
Uygur was offered a reduced role as a weekend and fill-in host that would have paid him twice as much money, but he declined the offer (Democracy Now!, 7/22/11).
Griffin took issue with Uygur’s account, telling the New York Times that (7/20/11) “we never told Cenk what to say or what not to say.” (Uygur acknowledges that he was never directly censored, just pressured to conform.) But in the same article, Griffin acknowledged he did, as Uygur alleged, reference “people in Washington” having negative views of the show.
“The ‘people in Washington,’ [Griffin] said, were MSNBC producers who were responsible for booking guests for the 6 p.m. hour, and some of them had said that Mr. Uygur’s aggressive body language and overall demeanor were making it harder to book guests.”
But given MSNBC’s past record in similar instances, Uygur’s accusations seem quite plausible. After Donahue’s show was canceled in 2003, a network memo leaked out (FAIR Action Alert, 3/7/03) saying the host’s antiwar views presented a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.... He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The show, the memo said, could become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
Olbermann’s firing came just after NBC was purchased by Comcast (Extra, 3/11). The host had come to represent the channel’s reputation as the most liberal option on cable news. He had long drawn the ire of the corporate executives he answers to at NBC, and a few months before his firing, he was briefly suspended for making political donations to guests (Guardian, 11/5/10). Olbermann had also raised hackles at the network for his constant spars with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, which prompted Fox News and NBC officials to attempt to muzzle their stars from further back-and-forth attacks (FAIR Action Alert, 8/7/09).
Fears that Comcast—whose executives have prominently donated large amounts to conservative campaigns and causes—would make the network even more inhospitable to progressive voices have hardly been allayed by Uygur’s cancellation. As Lee Fang of Think Progress (11/5/10) reports, Comcast also has a motive for avoiding antagonizing the incumbent administration:
Unlike Donahue, Uygur could not be accused of promoting a “liberal antiwar agenda”; he supported the Afghan War until very recently (Huffington Post, 12/1/09) and supported Obama’s decision to bomb Libya as part of a NATO campaign (Truthout, 6/3/11).
Uygur was, however, frequently quite critical of Obama, especially in his dealings with Republicans on economic and environmental issues. Before being given his own show, he suggested that Obama was either “the world’s worst negotiator” or might actually “not be a progressive” (Dylan Ratigan Show,12/8/10). When the White House lashed out at progressives who were critical of the administration in the run-up to the 2010 midterm elections, saying they were “irresponsible,” Uygur responded angrily, saying Obama lives “in a bubble in D.C. where you try to please all your Washington buddies, the right-wingers and the media” (Early Morning Swim, 9/29/10), and accused him of trying to “scapegoat his own base” for a poor showing in 2010.
As a full-time host, he continued his attacks on Obama. Uygur said Obama passed a weak financial regulation bill in June because he didn’t want “to offend the Wall Street guys,” in part because he “takes their money” (MSNBC Live, 6/2/11). He also criticized the president for legitimizing Bush administration surveillance tactics, such as the warrantless wiretapping program (MSNBC Live, 6/2/11): “As a former constitutional law professor, he should be embarrassed of that decision. That program basically destroys the Fourth Amendment.”
Could Comcast have been unsettled by such critiques from the left? Former presidential candidate Al Sharpton, who replaced Uygur, recently vowed “not to criticize the president about anything” in an interview with 60 Minutes (5/19/11). The segment also noted that Sharpton was now “a trusted White House adviser” and that “given his loyalty and his change from confrontational to accommodating, the administration is rewarding him with access and assignments.”
Interestingly, Current TV, which hired Olbermann earlier this year to host a nightly news program, has recently hired Uygur to bring his popular Internet show, the Young Turks, to cable TV (Current TV, 9/20/11). While the young channel has only a tiny fraction of the audience that MSNBC gets, its willingness to collect talentMSNBC deems too anti-establishment could steal away some of the very viewers the psuedo-left channel is trying to target.
Michael Corcoran (MichaelCorcoran.blog spot.com), a freelance journalist based in Boston, writes frequently for Extra!, as well as for such outlets as the Nation and the Boston Globe.
Uygur’s ouster represented the third time in recent years that a show hosted by someone with progressive ideals and a willingness to challenge the status quo was canceled, despite good ratings. In January of this year Keith Olbermann, well known for his public disputes with right-wing figures, was terminated by MSNBC, just after control of the channel was sold by General Electric to Comcast (Extra!, 3/11). In 2003, during the run-up to the Iraq War, Phil Donahue (one of the few elite media members to openly oppose the invasion) was taken off the air due, a leaked memo would reveal, to his antiwar views (FAIR Action Alert, 3/7/03).
Uygur, who began hosting MSNBC Live in the 6 p.m. weeknight slot in January, said he was warned before his show was cancelled by MSNBC president Phil Griffin that his aggressive style did not reflect MSNBC’s role as a reputable establishment outlet, and that he needed to “tone it down.”
“Outsiders are cool—but we’re insiders, we’re the establishment,” Uygur says Griffin told him (Salon, 7/21/11). “There are two audiences. There is the audience you are trying to appeal to, the viewers. And there is management. And management is basically the club. And they want to make sure that you are cool—can play ball with the club.”
His bosses also told him that “people in Washington were concerned about [his] tone,” Uygur said, and even sent him notes asking him to “act more like a senator.”
Ignoring this advice, Uygur saw his ratings consistently increase; his show, he said, consistently beat its 6 p.m. competition on CNN. But ratings clearly aren’t everything at MSNBC: In June his show was axed.
MSNBC took a drastic ratings hit following the removal of Olbermann, whose replacement, Lawrence O’Donnell, lost about 35 percent of the viewers in the advertiser-coveted 25-to-54 age group. The weak lead-in ratings have also hurt Rachel Maddow’s ratings at 9 p.m., which are down 15 percent, and have put the channel “on the verge of falling back into third place among the cable news networks,” the New York Times (9/27/11) reported.
Uygur was offered a reduced role as a weekend and fill-in host that would have paid him twice as much money, but he declined the offer (Democracy Now!, 7/22/11).
Griffin took issue with Uygur’s account, telling the New York Times that (7/20/11) “we never told Cenk what to say or what not to say.” (Uygur acknowledges that he was never directly censored, just pressured to conform.) But in the same article, Griffin acknowledged he did, as Uygur alleged, reference “people in Washington” having negative views of the show.
“The ‘people in Washington,’ [Griffin] said, were MSNBC producers who were responsible for booking guests for the 6 p.m. hour, and some of them had said that Mr. Uygur’s aggressive body language and overall demeanor were making it harder to book guests.”
But given MSNBC’s past record in similar instances, Uygur’s accusations seem quite plausible. After Donahue’s show was canceled in 2003, a network memo leaked out (FAIR Action Alert, 3/7/03) saying the host’s antiwar views presented a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.... He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The show, the memo said, could become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
Olbermann’s firing came just after NBC was purchased by Comcast (Extra, 3/11). The host had come to represent the channel’s reputation as the most liberal option on cable news. He had long drawn the ire of the corporate executives he answers to at NBC, and a few months before his firing, he was briefly suspended for making political donations to guests (Guardian, 11/5/10). Olbermann had also raised hackles at the network for his constant spars with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, which prompted Fox News and NBC officials to attempt to muzzle their stars from further back-and-forth attacks (FAIR Action Alert, 8/7/09).
Fears that Comcast—whose executives have prominently donated large amounts to conservative campaigns and causes—would make the network even more inhospitable to progressive voices have hardly been allayed by Uygur’s cancellation. As Lee Fang of Think Progress (11/5/10) reports, Comcast also has a motive for avoiding antagonizing the incumbent administration:
Why would Comcast be interested in silencing progressive voices? Histori-cally, Comcast has boosted its profits by buying up various telecommunication and media content companies—instead of providing faster Internet or better services.... Many of these mergers, as Public Citizen and Free Press have reported, have been allowed by regulators because of Comcast’s considerable political muscle. Com-cast’s latest regulatory battle has been to oppose net neutrality—a rule allowing a free and open Internet—because the company would prefer to have customers pay for preferred online content.
Unlike Donahue, Uygur could not be accused of promoting a “liberal antiwar agenda”; he supported the Afghan War until very recently (Huffington Post, 12/1/09) and supported Obama’s decision to bomb Libya as part of a NATO campaign (Truthout, 6/3/11).
Uygur was, however, frequently quite critical of Obama, especially in his dealings with Republicans on economic and environmental issues. Before being given his own show, he suggested that Obama was either “the world’s worst negotiator” or might actually “not be a progressive” (Dylan Ratigan Show,12/8/10). When the White House lashed out at progressives who were critical of the administration in the run-up to the 2010 midterm elections, saying they were “irresponsible,” Uygur responded angrily, saying Obama lives “in a bubble in D.C. where you try to please all your Washington buddies, the right-wingers and the media” (Early Morning Swim, 9/29/10), and accused him of trying to “scapegoat his own base” for a poor showing in 2010.
As a full-time host, he continued his attacks on Obama. Uygur said Obama passed a weak financial regulation bill in June because he didn’t want “to offend the Wall Street guys,” in part because he “takes their money” (MSNBC Live, 6/2/11). He also criticized the president for legitimizing Bush administration surveillance tactics, such as the warrantless wiretapping program (MSNBC Live, 6/2/11): “As a former constitutional law professor, he should be embarrassed of that decision. That program basically destroys the Fourth Amendment.”
Could Comcast have been unsettled by such critiques from the left? Former presidential candidate Al Sharpton, who replaced Uygur, recently vowed “not to criticize the president about anything” in an interview with 60 Minutes (5/19/11). The segment also noted that Sharpton was now “a trusted White House adviser” and that “given his loyalty and his change from confrontational to accommodating, the administration is rewarding him with access and assignments.”
Interestingly, Current TV, which hired Olbermann earlier this year to host a nightly news program, has recently hired Uygur to bring his popular Internet show, the Young Turks, to cable TV (Current TV, 9/20/11). While the young channel has only a tiny fraction of the audience that MSNBC gets, its willingness to collect talentMSNBC deems too anti-establishment could steal away some of the very viewers the psuedo-left channel is trying to target.
Michael Corcoran (MichaelCorcoran.blog spot.com), a freelance journalist based in Boston, writes frequently for Extra!, as well as for such outlets as the Nation and the Boston Globe.
9/3/11
The End of the Bill Keller Era
Available in the newest issue (Aug 2011) of Extra.
When Bill Keller announced that he would soon be stepping down as the New York Times’ top editor, he was hailed as the man “who rebuilt the confidence of the New York Times newsroom after the Jayson Blair scandal” (Forbes, 6/2/11). Rem Rieder of American Journalism Review (3–4/11) wrote that Keller “righted the ship” and “deserves major credit for steering our most important news organization in an immensely challenging time, for the most part avoiding the icebergs.” Hendrik Hertzberg (New Yorker, 6/3/11) commended his tenure: “The quality and quantity of Times journalism remain unsurpassed on Planet Earth.”
Despite all the praise, Keller’s record of major editorial decisions during his eight-year reign—especially on matters of national security, foreign policy and domestic surveillance—is littered with journalistic disappointments that warrant criticism rather than praise.
Underlying many of these critical decisions is a remarkable deference to state power, whether under a Republican or Democratic administration: his suppression of information about the National Security Agency’s illegal wiretapping program, his refusal to use the word “torture” when the U.S. engaged in it, and his closeness to the government regarding the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy project.
In a speech given at FAIR’s 25th anniversary ceremony (4/28/11), Glenn Greenwald highlighted Keller’s relationship with the government when he described the editor’s handling of the release of documents fromWikiLeaks:
Despite all the praise, Keller’s record of major editorial decisions during his eight-year reign—especially on matters of national security, foreign policy and domestic surveillance—is littered with journalistic disappointments that warrant criticism rather than praise.
Underlying many of these critical decisions is a remarkable deference to state power, whether under a Republican or Democratic administration: his suppression of information about the National Security Agency’s illegal wiretapping program, his refusal to use the word “torture” when the U.S. engaged in it, and his closeness to the government regarding the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy project.
In a speech given at FAIR’s 25th anniversary ceremony (4/28/11), Glenn Greenwald highlighted Keller’s relationship with the government when he described the editor’s handling of the release of documents fromWikiLeaks:
What [Keller] is most proud of is that…the New York Times, before it publishes any of these [controversial or classified] documents, goes to the government and says, “These are the things that we wish to publish,” and then listens to the government say, “Don’t publish this and don’t publish that,” and in general the New York Times complies.... He’s so proud of the fact that he’s gotten government approval for what it is that he’s doing; it’s the proof that he’s doing the right thing.
Read the rest here.
6/5/11
The myth of U.S. humanitarian intervention in Libya
This article was the May/June cover article for the International Socialist Review.
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Read the rest here.
4/10/11
Michael Corcoran: Corporate Media Takes a Side in Debate over 'Entitlements'
Originally published at Truthout
Michael Corcoran
March 30, 2011.
Corporate Media Takes a Side in Debate over 'Entitlements'
Pundits and politicians have often said that the thought of cutting Social Security and Medicare are, as Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post described them, the "third rails of American politics. Nobody wants to touch them." This, Cillizza argues, is an unfortunate trend, since chopping these staples to the United States ever-thinning safety net, is the "obvious fix" to our nation's budget problems. "The simple solution is to make cuts to two large government entitlement programs: Social Security and Medicare," he notes.
Despite this often repeated claim that cutting Social Security and Medicare is never discussed in American politics, in reality, the media is relentless in its perpetuation of the myth that cuts to these programs are needed - and right away. In recent months, the media has served to amplify the ideological claims of elites that use the recession - caused by large financial institutions' reckless behavior - as an excuse to further burden the nation's poor and elderly, even as the rich continue to benefit from massive tax breaks and bailouts. The question the media pose is not whether Social Security and Medicare should be cut, but when and how. But there is no debate as to who should sacrifice to balance the budget: the poor and the elderly.
In recent months, especially since President Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform released their initial report on deficit reduction and the GOP took over the House, the corporate media has excluded views of labor or working class-people, ignored alternative proposals to cutting these programs - such as various forms of revenue increases, all more popular with the populace - and perpetuated the falsehood that Social Security is in the throes of a deep crisis and is responsible for our budget woes. The idea that those on Wall Street who caused the financial crises - and the extreme revenue shortfalls that followed - should be asked to help pay a little more of their massive profits in an age of historically-low taxation on the rich is, indeed, the true "third rail" in the media.
Corporate Media, Corporate Agenda
To close followers of the economics of the mass media, it comes as no great surprise that the media is effectively serving as a communications arm of corporate America - the media is corporate America. And the corporatization of the media has only grown this year. In a few weeks, media activists will meet in Boston for Free Press's National Conference on Media Reform. Among the major topics to be discussed are the increasing corporate domination of the media; increased consolidation with the merger of NBC and Comcast; the passing of Citizens United, which served to createan effective "stimulus package" for media companies due to increased political ads; the battle over net neutrality, which will determine if corporations will dominate the web at the expense of independent web sites and the attempted desecration of public media, further enabling corporations to control information in the United States.
So, it comes as little surprise that the same media that supported the urgentpassing of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the most massive example of upward redistribution of wealth in US history, and are currently singing itspraises as an unmitigated success, would then ask for the nation's fiscal woes to be "fixed" on the backs of working-class people.
This sentiment does not merely come from the opinion makers, but the news pages of the major national papers, which continue to perpetuate the myth that Social Security is in crises. Consider the appraisal of New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes, who said Congress was tasked with the "unsustainable combination of fast-growing entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare and inadequate tax revenues." The Washington Post's news pages, likewise, push the same flawed narrative. Reporter Lori Montgomery concluded that "budget experts say it would be difficult to significantly reduce future deficits without addressing the rising cost of Social Security."
It appears the Post ignored "budget experts" who offered a differing view. For example, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) and its co-founder Dean Baker - one of the only economists to predict the housing bubble that the media missed out on - have shown that the program is solvent at least until 2037, giving us decades to tweak policies to make sure those who receive benefits in 2038 get 100 percent benefits.
But, the likes of Baker are rarely given a platform in the US mainstream media, where the expert pundits represent an incredibly narrow range of opinions. On shows such as "Meet the Press," conservative Democrats, such as chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council Harold Ford, often, absurdly, appear on the show as representatives of the left.
Consider the panel discussion on the show after the release of the deficit reduction report. The panel included Newt Gingrich, Alan Greenspan on the right and on "the left," Ford and Vanity Fair's Bethany Maclean (not exactly a modern-day Eugene Debs). Ford used the platform to give right-wing talking points and bash the left. "As long as you don't allow the far left and the far right, again, to crowd out the predominant middle, we can get a lot of this done," he said. "If that means making tough choices on Social Security - I'm 40, I'm willing to give mine up and I think a lot of people my age who may reach a certain income level are willing to do the same."
Host David Gregory was convinced by the wisdom of cuts to entitlements. "I don't see why, for instance, some of these suggestions, Harold, on Social Security are going to be demagogued to death," Gregory said. "Why, in 50 years, people can't look at raising the retirement age and have that be a serious discussion point?"
The Real Social Security Crisis
While the likes of Ford and Gregory may be able to endure cuts to Social Security, statistics show current and future retirees cannot. In fact, the real Social Security crisis is not that the program is insolvent - as noted above, it is in decent fiscal shape - but that the benefits are no longer sufficient to enable many people to live decent lives.
As CEPR reports, "the vast majority of near-retirees will rely on Social Security for the vast majority of their income in retirement," and therefore "cuts in Social Security imply large cuts in income for a population that is already not especially wealthy." The real debate in the media ought to be over how to increase benefits, so we can provide retirees with a dignified life.
Raising benefits should not be viewed as a radical idea. Contrary to media hysteria, Social Security is not reckless overindulgence in social welfare, but rather a modest (relative to other countries) pension program, that could be improved in the richest nation in the world. According to a report from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), our federal pension system offers quite meager benefits, compared to other developed nations in the OECD. Social Security accounts for about 16 percent of our total public expenditure, which is lower than about 80 percent of all developed nations.
In fact, there are many changes we can make to increase Social Security benefits - the most obvious of which is to implement more progressive taxation. Currently, Social Security taxes are capped at $106,000. This means that someone making $1 million a year is only paying Social Security taxes on about 10 percent of their income. If we removed the cap, the program would remain solvent for 75 more years, according to theCongressional Budget Office. Another option would be a tax on financial speculation, a modest tax on Wall Street trading that could raise $1 trillion in revenue over the course of a decade.
In fact, Baker estimates that raising Social Security by 25 percent would cost about 1.5 percent of GDP, about 66 percent of which would be covered by a financial speculation tax. To put this into perspective, the increase in defense spending just from 2000 - 2010, accounted for 1.8 percent of GDP. "This seems affordable to me," Baker said in an email.
Indeed, wealthy people can afford the tax. According to a study done by an economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, between 1979 and 2005, mean after-tax income for the top 1 percent increased by 176 percent, while the bottom 20 percent saw an increase of 6 percent only. With the extension of the Bush tax cuts, this trend seems likely to continue. But the idea of raising taxes, even slightly, on the rich is out of the realm of acceptable discourse in the media.
The Real Health Care Crises
Media attacks on Medicare are also fallacious. The general argument portrayed in the media is that the inefficiency of Medicare is causing costs to rise at a fast rate, adding to the deficit and thus, it must be cut. But Medicare is actually more efficient than private health care plans - its cost is rising 8.3 percent annually per beneficiary for Medicare, compared to 9.3 percent for private plans. The increase has a lot to do with the increase of people over the age of 65, not flaws with the program.
But rather than cutting Medicare, as pundits proclaim we must, the media should target on the real villain of the deficit: the exploding health care costs associated with the US's broken private health care system. Public plans such as Medicare are actually more efficient than private plans, since they have considerably less administrative waste. In fact, as this graph shows, if you replaced the US wasteful system - which costs about 17 percent of GDP, almost double of the average developed nation - with any public system from any OECD country, the deficit would be eliminated.
But, as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has documented, the narrow ideology of the mass media does not even allow for a discussion of public health care. In a study of news coverage during the debate over federal health care reform, the organization concluded that out of "hundreds of stories" that mentioned health care reform "all but 18 of these stories made no mention of 'single-payer' ... and only five included the views of advocates of single-payer - none of which appeared on television."
The Media Agenda
As noted above, it is neither surprising, nor conspiratorial, to suggest that media companies - owned by large corporations - would produce information that would benefit their own institutions. This is precisely why the increasing corporate stranglehold of the media is such a topic of concern for media activists and why alternative media sources are so crucial to our democracy. The coverage of Social Security and Medicare in recent months is a perfect example of the narrow, ideologically driven agenda of the corporate media that is serving to help the rich dismantle important social programs.
3/10/11
Al-Jazeera, as endorsed by Hillary Clinton (The Guardian)
With its Arab Spring coverage, al-Jazeera won new fans. Isn't it time to end the channel's virtual blackout on US cable networks?
By Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher
Al-Jazeera's esteem in the United States has reached unprecedented heights in the aftermath of its coverage of the revolutionary uprising in Egypt, which clearly displayed how embarrassingly inadequate US cable news outlets are by comparison. Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was compelled recently to concede that al-Jazeera English (AJE) provides "real news" coverage and actual on-the-ground journalism, unlike its American counterparts, which, she said, rely too heavily on cheap punditry.
Despite the US's unique position of power and influence, cable providers in America do not offer a single world news channel. Not even CNN International, the grownup sister channel of CNN, is available in the US; American audiences are forced to endure the entertainment-centric, domestic version of the channel – as Clinton described it, "a million commercials … and arguments between talking heads."
Al-Jazeera's impressive coverage of the uprising in Egypt has reopened a debate over whether cable providers should offer AJE as an option for US viewers. The channel is pressing the issue as never before, devoting a page on its site to encourage Americans to "Demand al-Jazeera", and using Twitter and Facebook to build a national movement for cable companies to offer the channel. With recent reports that Comcast is in negotiations with the Qatar-based network, now is the time for the effective blackout of al-Jazeera English in the US to end.
Read the rest, here.
1/5/11
Media Don't Bite the Ruling That Feeds Them
Originally published by Extra!, the monthly magazine for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Citizens United fills airwaves—and corporate coffers
By Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher
The 2010 midterm elections were the first since the Supreme Court's 5-4 Citizens United decision allowed unlimited corporate funding of political broadcasts in elections. As was widely predicted at the time, spending hit unprecedented highs this election cycle, including record sums on television ads. In the words of the Associated Press (10/29/10), Citizens essentially constituted a “stimulus package” for broadcast and cable media corporations, which saw major increases in revenue, thus benefiting from the ever-deepening relationship between money and politics.
In fact, media corporations raked in a record $3 billion this mid-term election cycle, not only breaking the previous mid-term spending record of $2.4 billion in 2006, but also surpassing the $2.7 billion spent in the 2008 presidential election cycle (AP, 10/29/10). Much of this windfall can be attributed directly to the Citizens decision, according to a report from the media tracking group SNL Kagan, which described the 2010 election climate as “a political ad revenue treasure trove for broadcasters" (Hill, 9/22/10).
CBS, according to AP (11/4/10), “pounced on an advertising revival in the broadcast media to produce a 53 percent increase in its third-quarter net income"; other media companies likewise “reported robust ad gains.” Media giant Time Warner--owner of cable channels like CNN, TNT and TBS--saw profits rise by more than one-third in the quarter, in part due to a 23 percent increase in ad revenue (CNET, 11/4/10).
Local stations likewise have their snouts in the trough. Political ads are expected to account for 11 percent of the total revenue for local broadcasters this year, up from 7 percent in 2006 (AP, 10/29/10). In Boston, where a 30-second election spot costs about $25,000, demand for ads was so high that local channels were actually turning them down. “There are not enough commercial breaks and too many advertisers. It’s been absolutely crazy,” said Andy Hoffman, a sales manager for Channel 5 in Boston (Boston Globe, 10/30/10).
Media companies not only benefit from ads, but also now have the ability to donate as much money as they want to politicians' campaigns. This new leverage will enable media corporations to fight for issues that impact their bottom line, such as relaxing telecommunications regulations and fighting against net neutrality to ensure them a competitive advantage over smaller, independent news sites.
Read the rest, here.
In fact, media corporations raked in a record $3 billion this mid-term election cycle, not only breaking the previous mid-term spending record of $2.4 billion in 2006, but also surpassing the $2.7 billion spent in the 2008 presidential election cycle (AP, 10/29/10). Much of this windfall can be attributed directly to the Citizens decision, according to a report from the media tracking group SNL Kagan, which described the 2010 election climate as “a political ad revenue treasure trove for broadcasters" (Hill, 9/22/10).
CBS, according to AP (11/4/10), “pounced on an advertising revival in the broadcast media to produce a 53 percent increase in its third-quarter net income"; other media companies likewise “reported robust ad gains.” Media giant Time Warner--owner of cable channels like CNN, TNT and TBS--saw profits rise by more than one-third in the quarter, in part due to a 23 percent increase in ad revenue (CNET, 11/4/10).
Local stations likewise have their snouts in the trough. Political ads are expected to account for 11 percent of the total revenue for local broadcasters this year, up from 7 percent in 2006 (AP, 10/29/10). In Boston, where a 30-second election spot costs about $25,000, demand for ads was so high that local channels were actually turning them down. “There are not enough commercial breaks and too many advertisers. It’s been absolutely crazy,” said Andy Hoffman, a sales manager for Channel 5 in Boston (Boston Globe, 10/30/10).
Media companies not only benefit from ads, but also now have the ability to donate as much money as they want to politicians' campaigns. This new leverage will enable media corporations to fight for issues that impact their bottom line, such as relaxing telecommunications regulations and fighting against net neutrality to ensure them a competitive advantage over smaller, independent news sites.
Read the rest, here.
12/6/10
Media Distortions Legitimize Honduras Regime
Originally published at Truthout. Also published at Z Magazine.
Honduras held elections on November 29, 2009, that were deemed illegitimate by most of the international community and resulted in the presidency of Porfirio Lobo, a conservative politician and agricultural landowner. [I] The election occurred just months after the illegal coup overthrowing President Manuel Zelaya and, as a result of a significant boycott, only included candidates who supported the coup. [II]
At the time of the elections, the US mainstream media had an atrocious record of reporting on the coup itself, as well as on the elections that followed, helping to legitimize a startling attack on Honduran democracy. [III]Despite the illegal nature of the coup and numerous accounts of human rights abuses against supporters of Manuel Zelaya - including violence against protesters, mass arrests and crackdowns on press freedom - the US media portrayed the events in a way that painted Zelaya as a villainous follower of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and legitimized those who ousted him, in part by ignoring their many crimes and abuses. [IV]
Unfortunately, in the year that has followed these two troubling events, little has changed: the Lobo regime has continued the human rights abuses that have plagued the country for more than a year, while the media has downplayed, distorted or ignored the crimes of his regime.
Read the rest, here.
10/7/10
Media Continue Bank Bailout Advocacy
Originally published at Extra!, the magazine for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher
For corporate media, the verdict is already in: The Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), the unpopular program that redistributed some $700 billion of U.S. taxpayer funds upwards, to the very financial institutions that contributed to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, is an unabashed success.
It is hardly stunning that corporate media would react favorably to one of the biggest boons for big corporations in U.S. history. When the bailout initially failed to make it through Congress in 2008 due to House opposition, journalists quickly accepted and reinforced the narrative that the unpopular legislation--which gave unprecedented power to the Treasury Department with virtually no mechanism for oversight or review--needed to be passed so urgently that a serious national debate was not even possible (Extra!, 1/09).
"In the Congress of the United States, the insane are now running the asylum," wrote Dana Milbank in the Washington Post (9/30/08). The Post editorial page produced three editorials in three days (9/30/08=10/2/08) in support of the policy. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (10/1/08) claimed, "We have House members, many of whom I suspect can't balance their own checkbooks, rejecting a complex rescue package because some voters, whom I fear also don't understand, swamped them with phone calls."
As Dean Baker and Kris Warner of the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted (Extra!, 1/09), despite claims echoed throughout the media that the bill was too urgent to even be subject to reasonable scrutiny, the Treasury Department "took no action for 10 days after the bill had been passed."
Now that the program is coming to an end, media--with a few notable exceptions like Gretchen Morgenson at the New York Times (4/18/10)--are claiming the corporate bailout they so fervently supported has been a monumental success. Two primary claims have been pervasive: that TARP was a good idea that’s “working,” and that it was a “great deal for taxpayers” (Washington Post, 4/1/10). Progressive critiques challenging the official narrative have been almost entirely ignored by the corporate press, despite the fact that such challenges have appeared throughout alternative media (Pew Research Center, 4/28/10; FireDogLake, 7/15/10).
In the words of the Post editorial board (7/5/10), even though "pretty much everyone hated" the "$700 billion bailout fund," it has "arguably saved the U.S. economy.... Any member of Congress who supported TARP, Republican or Democrat, took a sensible risk that has been vindicated by the program's result."
Similarly, Reuters (8/19/10) reported that TARP's success would "dilute the previously potent political attack that lawmakers who voted for the bailout were rewarding Wall Street greed while putting taxpayers at risk." Former George W. Bush administration official James K. Glassman declared in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (8/26/10), "It has to be said that the TARP and the other financial rescues were necessary and efficient."
Prominent progressive critics contend TARP is a program that is doomed to failure. Even if it succeeds in temporarily rescuing the financial sector, the failure to enact broad systemic changes only increases the risk of future, more expensive bailouts. Dean Baker, for instance, suggested (CEPR, 7/5/10) that the "financial Armageddon" averted by TARP
>>>would have meant the demise of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and most of the other Wall Street titans, but probably would not have led to a qualitatively worse economic situation for the rest of us than what we actually saw. In fact, there would have been a great benefit from this financial Armageddon in that it would let the market wipe out the fast-dealing, high-flying Wall Street gang in a single blow.
This would eliminate the culture of synthetic CDOs and naked credit default swaps that provide ever more sophisticated and expensive ways to gamble. It would also eliminate many of the huge multi-million dollar paychecks that the Wall Street boys take home every year (or week). In other words, this is not obviously a bad story.<<<
Financial blogger Yves Smith (Naked Capitalism, 6/23/10) likewise criticized the Obama administration’s choice to “patch the system up with duct tape and baling wire, and if it looks even remotely operational, tout it as tremendous success,” rather than enacting serious reform. The choice, she continued, reflects the administration’s "decision to reconstitute, as much as possible, the banking industry that had just driven itself and the global economy off the cliff” and “to cast its lot with an unreformed banking industry."
Yet these important ideas were rarely presented to the American people by the corporate-owned press, thus limiting their impact and damaging citizens’ ability to come to informed conclusions. "I have almost never had my criticisms of the TARP in the media," said Baker in an e-mail to Extra!.
Indeed, media adhered to their time-honored practice of framing the debate between centrist Democrats and far-right conservatives (Extra!, 9=10/04)--in this case, restricting the “debate” to pro-TARP voices on one side and militant free-market absolutists on the other, who oppose the program as a violation of laissez-faire principles. That was the form the debate took on Fox Business Channel (12/22/09), TARP supporter Lawrence Ausubel, economics professor at University of Maryland, faced off against Cody Willard, a right-wing libertarian critic.
A New York Times article (7/1/10) looking back on TARP included critiques of the plan from conservatives like Sen. Richard Shelby (“blatant accounting fraud”) and Rep. Spencer Bachus (“a ridiculous scheme”), but ignored progressive critics in Congress, such as Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The claim that the taxpayers are being fully reimbursed by beneficiaries of TARP is likewise being vigorously advanced by the corporate press. The New York Times has been ebullient regarding the program's outcome for some time now (8/30/09): "Nearly a year after the federal rescue of the nation’s biggest banks, taxpayers have begun seeing profits from the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid.... So far, that experiment [TARP] is more than paying off."
More recently, the Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin asked (4/12/10), "What if, after all that panting over Washington’s bailout of the financial system, we learned that it actually worked?" He continued:
>>>Some officials [are] suggesting that if the economic recovery continues apace, the bailout program could eventually turn from red to black. That may seem far-fetched to anyone who remembers the dire predictions about banks like Citigroup, but the numbers tell a different story. The government’s $45 billion investment in Citigroup alone is on track to make a profit of nearly $11 billion, plus $8 billion or so in interest and other fees. People inside the administration no longer refer to Citigroup as the "Death Star"; now it is a "profit center.”<<<
Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 7/5/10) wondered whether the assertion that TARP did not cost the taxpayers anything is “based on ungodly stupidity or is just plain dishonest”:
>>>The TARP money was a form of insurance. The vast majority of insurance policies are never paid off, but that does not mean they have no value. The point here is that the banks were on the edge of going bankrupt. The government, through the TARP and the Fed, gave the banks the loans and the guarantees that assured the markets that the banks would survive.... This is all a gift from the taxpayers to some of the richest people in the country.<<<
In a rare instance where a progressive critic was quoted by the mainstream press on the issue--albeit buried in an otherwise upbeat TARP story by Sorkin (New York Times, 4/13/10)--Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz said widespread efforts to glorify TARP's success are "disingenuous and a real attempt to distract people," as they don't factor in lost interest on the money spent. "Did we get back anything commensurate with the risk?... Clearly the answer is no," he said. Sorkin dismissively reminded readers that Stiglitz "has made a career of seeing every glass as half-empty."
Even Elizabeth Warren, who has been featured in the news as a potential leader for the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, has been largely ignored by the press when she reported on TARP’s flaws. As the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel monitoring the use of TARP funds, she issued a strong critique of TARP's impact on small banks in the panel's July report (Congressional Oversight Panel, 7/14/10), saying TARP "served Wall Street much better than anyone else." Neither the Post nor the Times published a single article citing Warren's findings. The panel’s May report (Congressional Oversight Panel, 5/12/10), also quite critical of aspects of TARP, was mostly ignored as well, getting only two small mentions in the Post (5/19/10, 8/4/10).
When TARP was pushed through with no sizable programs attached to help the average American (Economic Policy Institute, 9/29/08), the priority for policy makers became clear. As Baker observed in CounterPunch (6/2/10), the same people who praise TARP are now saying we must “act aggressively now to reduce the budget deficit” and “accept large cuts in Social Security and other important programs.”
"Why on earth," Baker asks, "should anyone trust what the bankers' economist accomplices are telling us?"
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