Moyers the Man
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| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog | Live from the Media Reform Conference |
Bill Moyers, giving the opening address at the National Media Reform Conference, is a wonderfully erudite expert on the subject of media reform. Quoting every expert off the top of his head, with the fluidity of a presidential candidate, he makes a compelling case that our major media is bought and sold by corporations. Therefore, their coverage favors the "powerful vested interests" and fails to provide the common person with the information he needs. He acknowledges the democratizing potential of blogs and social networking sites to spread information. But he laments the fact that they lack the resources to perform much investigative journalism.
Moyers effectively skewers the vapidity of television news coverage treats what officials in power say as the news, rather than what they do. And he is concerned that the few independent broadcast outlets left, like PBS and NPR, face financial and political pressure to go mainstream.
We are at a precipice today. The internet, according to Moyers, has the potential to rescue us from the consolidation of media power. To turn us into "a nation of storytellers." But, he warns, the same trend in television will come to the internet if we do not stop it, pointing to Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of MySpace as an example.
A couple quibbles: I wish Moyers eschewed the tired and inapt analogy to a "plantation." His points are strong enough to stand on their own, without a clunky and borderline offensive comparison of our media environment to the institution of slavery. Also, he pronounced Washington "War-shington."
Moyers effectively skewers the vapidity of television news coverage treats what officials in power say as the news, rather than what they do. And he is concerned that the few independent broadcast outlets left, like PBS and NPR, face financial and political pressure to go mainstream.
We are at a precipice today. The internet, according to Moyers, has the potential to rescue us from the consolidation of media power. To turn us into "a nation of storytellers." But, he warns, the same trend in television will come to the internet if we do not stop it, pointing to Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of MySpace as an example.
A couple quibbles: I wish Moyers eschewed the tired and inapt analogy to a "plantation." His points are strong enough to stand on their own, without a clunky and borderline offensive comparison of our media environment to the institution of slavery. Also, he pronounced Washington "War-shington."
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Last I checked, PBS is 90% financed by independent contributions.
Depending on what you mean by 'bought and sold'... any reason we wouldn't? If people want media that isn't, they're more than welcome to take their dollars and their mindshare and their eyeballs elsewhere.
If CNN is 'bought and sold by the corporations', and IndyMedia isn't (though I'd argue it's dominated by narrow-minded ideologues, which is far worse than anything corporate control might imply), and CNN does better... good for them.
Please provide the link to your 90% figure, or retract it. :)
As for the corporate media, I think the biggest internal change at both the big broadcasters and the cable networks was to insist on the news division being profitable. This was a pretty recent change, and we've seen the effects all too well. Sometimes it isn't appropriate to have quality determined by ratings, especially when we're dealing with journalism.
Personally I think it's not so much a question of some shadowy cabal of corporate CEOs determining what's going to show on the 10 o'clock news, but a question of funding -- good news, especially investigative reporting, is very expensive. So when department budgets get tight, the first things to go are the risky endeavors, the long-term newspieces, the foreign bureaus and correspondents, the pieces that might upset an advertiser. Somehow the showbiz segment never seems to get the axe. ;)
I've read long, ranting lists from both conservatives and lefties (like FAIR) of all the ways they see PBS as being incredibly biased toward "The Other Side". Since they can't both be right when it comes to assessing the "pressure" on CPB, Occam's Razor suggests they're doing alright on that front.
Cruising through Wikipedia, it turns out that A) I was actually focusing in on NPR, and B) The share of NPR's funding coming from the Fedgov ranges from 2% to higher (no good numbers for how high, but let's assume 20%) if you count "indirect" funding from subsidies paid out to individual stations, who then spend those subsidies buying programming.
I think it's absurd to count those subsidies as part of the "government funding", just as a private school receiving money from vouchers is not being funded by the government. So for NPR, we can go with 2%.
For PBS, what I could find on Wikipedia suggested they have some similar sort of arrangement, but I couldn't get any exact figures.
What googling turned up for me is that it seriously varies depending on what market you're in; Tiny red-state stations in Alaska or whereever else are much more dependent on government funds than the big blue-state stations in large urban markets. Also, that previous threats of cuts in government funding spurred increases in public giving to PBS that outstripped the level of the funding decrease - suggesting, in other words, that there is real potential for fully moving PBS off the government dole.
But as for funding numbers, Wikipedia was still the closest I came to anything concrete.
If you don't like the results there, buy something else.
This is an attitude of yours, not an objective comparison.
For instance, in China, search engines will order their results at the top based on how much individual companies paid them. (This is the case with Baidu.com, China's largest search engine).
By yours, my, and most people's mindsets here probably, that's a big no-no. But for the average Chinese, it actually makes them trust their search engine more, since if someone was willing to pay for it that suggests it's worth something to them.
If you don't like it, take your dollars and eyeballs elsewhere. If enough other people feel like you do, alternative avenues will arise (and they have!). If they don't, they don't.
You don't have a right to news the way you'd like it. You're a consumer in the market with your own preferences, just like anyone else.
You and I are among the percentage of people who would be unhappy if the investigative reporting gets cut. A much higher percentage of people would be upset if the showbiz segment gets cut.
We don't live in a country of everyone who thinks the same way as either of us, and that's not a bad thing.
As seen in virtually every major policy decision (such as the battle over steel tariffs), different industries and different firms within an industry will often come down on opposing sides of a given issue.
This emphasis on the homogeneity implied by the term "corporate control" is less about fact and more about making corporations the Big Bad Other. It's not a responsible way of making an argument.