The CEO of General Electric does more than settle on-air feuds:
In the days before President Obama’s last news conference, as the networks weighed whether to give up a chunk of their precious prime time, Rahm Emanuel went straight to the top.
Rather than calling ABC, the White House chief of staff phoned Bob Iger, chief executive of parent company Disney. Instead of contacting NBC, Emanuel went to Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric. He also spoke with Les Moonves, the chief executive of CBS Corp., the company spun off from Viacom.
Whether this amounted to undue pressure or plain old Chicago arm-twisting, Emanuel got results: the fourth hour of lucrative network time for his boss in six months.
I’m not complaining about the Obama administration doing this (the same way I thought that the networks should cover all the Bush events, as long he took questions). But this, along with yesterday’s story about Murdoch’s and Immelt’s involvement in the Battle Of the O’s — puts the lie to the idea that anything about tv networks is in any way insulated from the whims of the CEO parent companies. To assert, as Charlie Rose has, “I promise you, CBS News and ABC News and NBC News are not influenced by the corporations that may own those companies” is simply ludicrous.
How the hell did this happen? How is it that our public airwaves are completely controlled by large companies?
ChrisS
The public airwaves are sold by the government, supposedly in our “best interest.”
And when anything is sold, it goes to the highest bidder.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a couple of billion laying around to takeover NBC.
anonevent
Profit.
SATSQ
Incertus
How is it that our public airwaves are completely controlled by large companies?
The FCC has turned the license renewal process into a formality?
It may be that in the past, corporate ownership kept their fingers out of the news division–Paddy Chayefsky didn’t think so, but it’s possible, I guess. The only difference is that now there’s no pretending.
Napoleon
Good God, a link to the WaPo that I clicked on.
wilfred
Ben Bagdikian (SP?) wrote about this ages ago in The Media Monopoly. Michael Powell helped make it a reality.
liberal
@ChrisS:
What really sucks is that it would surprise me if we the public ever get a decent fraction of what the airwaves are truly worth. (This isn’t just TV; it’s also radio, wireless phone companies, etc.)
Just because there’s a competitive auction doesn’t mean the net present value of the airwaves, or anything close to it, is being obtained.
I think the best way around this would be to dramatically shorten the contract length. Don’t know what it is now, but I assume it’s for a long time.
PeakVT
How the hell did this happen?
Telecom Act of 1996 followed by the Bush administration regulatory laxity.
Zifnab
Broadcasting ain’t cheap. Broadcasting in HD and keeping the reception crystal clear from sea to shining sea is especially not cheap. Putting up the fancy CNN graphics and the high budget studios and getting the million dollar personalities center stage is down right expensive. And then you’ve got to realize that there’s a shit ton of money in broadcasting.
The public airwaves have always been dominated by the folks with the most money. In fact, the internet revolution has been a uniquely defining moment in media because – unlike newpaper, radio, and TV – its the first medium that DOESN’T cost millions of dollars in overhead to get off the ground.
Mark
At least we now have Al Jazeera English offering a fresh perspective. Of course, it’s controlled by the whims of the emir of Qatar, but at least his biases are radically different from U.S. corporate biases. So things balance out a little bit.
ChrisS
Just because there’s a competitive auction doesn’t mean the net present value of the airwaves, or anything close to it, is being obtained.
True – the highest bidder isn’t necessarily paying full price. Just like all those mineral rights leases and grazing leases.
Hell, if Congress ever tried to charge full price for grazing rights or water they’d be indicted for conspiring to kill off the common American farmer.
Ty Lookwell
Charlie Rose is such a self-satisfied, power-fluffing celebrity humper, the useful idiot of the country’s power elite.
inkadu
How did it come to this?
It’s the free market at work. CEO’s play golf and air what they want on their networks. Over time, they make money, which allows them to play more golf. Sometimes they lose, and sometimes they win, but the important thing to remember in all this that poor people do not play golf. [/McMeghan]
Where is the horse and the rider? Also.
Violet
They really think we’re stupid, don’t they? Underlings in any corporation do what the boss wants. The CEO is the boss. News-types are the underlings. Of course they’re “influenced.” If they just did whatever the heck they wanted, they could get fired. They know that just as the lowliest receptionist or mailroom person knows it. To try to pretend otherwise is ridiculous. Trying to make us believe it is insulting.
We let them. We the people, and all that. We could change it, but the majority of the public doesn’t care.
inkadu
@Violet: We could change it, but the majority of the public doesn’t care.
Why don’t you just get a talk show on MSNBC and try to convince them, then?
tc125231
The Moar You Know
They always have been, since the day that the first TV station took the first advertisement. Nothing’s changed except for your ability to percieve what’s really going on.
wilfred
@Mark:
last time I checked al Jazeera English was only available in 3 media markets in the entire country.
Leelee for Obama
This is why I call Rahm the Chicago Consiglieri and it’s with love, you betcha! Now, he needs to get on the stick with the Blue Dogs. These media bastards need a major wake-up call-hmmm-I love the smell of boycotts in the morning!
If you have moment read the Hiltzik articles on health care at the LA Times. And the Canadian Doctor’s also. Good stuff.
cmorenc
Consider that if instead of NBC or ABC being owned by big corporations, they were instead owned by Rupert Murdock. Such as is the case with Fox network. What are you going to do then?
It has always been that owners of newspapers and television stations have had the right to influence their news coverage, even though not all owners chose to exercise that in any pejorative way. That’s why spectrum-limited (i.e. broadcast rather than newsprint) media were long subject to ownership limitation/anti-concentration laws. Which are constructive and necessary, but inadequate to get the job done by themselves, because the tie from ownership to control is an inherently unsolveably problem i a society with a free press and free speech.
How do you propose getting around this inherent problem that the owner of a megaphone controls who gets to speak through it and to a significant extent, how? If you simply gave control over the media to government (or heavy government regulation) – now where does that end up? (Think what the Bush admin would have gladly done with that, though for awhile they had the media so snowed and then so cowered they didn’t need to have formal control).
IMHO the only way around this inherent problem is provided by the near-boundlessly expanding bandwidth of the internet and the proliferation of private blogs and other ways for ordinary but vigorously probing, thoughtful citizens to end-run the traditional mass media. Such as this blog. But whups! any nut can publish anything they want on the internet, however spurious, and attract a following (e.g. the “birther” stupidity). Sorry, there’s no way around that one. Just like the pamphleteers and small-circulation newspapers of the early days of the United States through the Civil War era (which were just as scandalously careless and irresponsibly biased and provacative as the most outrageous blogs on the net today) – that’s an inherent side-effect of the free press.
jibeaux
I love how 30 Rock satirizes this with the Sheinhardt Wig Co.
liberal
@Zifnab:
That’s not the question.
The question is, how much economic rent is being handed over to private parties instead of being retained by the public?
Similarly, one could say of the WTC site in NYC, that constructing a new tower there ain’t cheap. But that’s not the issue at hand. Rather, the issue is the land rent. In the case of the WTC site, it’s obviously worth a fortune, and the fact that constructing a new tower there isn’t cost-free doesn’t change that.
Thus, while no one would argue that the cost of transmission across the EM spectrum is free, the issue isn’t cost—the issue is the difference of revenue and cost, and what fraction of that difference is rent.
Similarly, drilling for oil ain’t cheap. The question, again, is what fraction of the difference between revenue and cost is rent, which should be retained by the public, not handed over to the oil companies. The latter are clearly entitled to the return to their investment of capital and labor, but not to the rent.
Morbo
OT and beating a dead horse: hey, everybody, we’re assholes!
jwb
@violet
I’m not sure We, the People are exactly letting them—though we are of course ultimately responsible. Broadcasting is very expensive, which basically means you need significant underwriting by either government or corporations to make it work at anything like a national level. With luck, internet “broadcasting” will bring these costs down, but even here pretty much every model is either avocational or ad based, so you either lose the systematic aspect (with the avocational model) or you are back to corporate underwriting influencing content (with the ad model). As for a return to more government regulation of content, it would take far more than a majority of the public caring to force a change when you need 60 votes in the Senate.
jwb
Did the site just blow up for anyone else?
“WordPress database error: [Got error 28 from storage engine]
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sparky
@cmorenc: all true, though reading your comment makes me realize the post is off. the problem is not that enterprises control news outlets; it is that there are so few of them. it is true that 40 years ago there were only three TV networks, but those networks faced strong competition from a variety of locally owned newspapers and radio stations. now, with deregulation, (incidentally, hastened under Clinton, like many things that have come to bear fruit in the Bush era) Murdoch can own TV, radio, and paper outlets, so the diversity of voices with megaphones has dimmed quite a bit. given that most Americans don’t spend time searching through blogs (whut?!) the variety of voices has been pared down to almost nothing.
i should say there is one important difference between yesterday and today–the motives. in the old days, when communication was controlled by individuals, those individuals could decide how to treat events. in other words, it was possible for a media owner (McCormick, for example) to push a particular line even if it meant less money for his company. in contrast, since money-making today is not a function of the company’s endeavors but rather its stock price, that lodestar has been substituted as the only measure of value. since there is only one measure of value, necessarily all the news outlets converge upon the same material, presented in the same fashion.
Zifnab
I have a great deal of extra space between posts. Which, I mean, is nice, I guess. But doesn’t do a lot for ease of reading.
someguy
Sparky, I’m not sure it’s entirely profit motivated. For some media outlets – like the newspapers – I’m fairly certain they’d be happy enough just to be able to meet expenses. Sure, individuals could run awesome newspapers if they wanted to. How much money should they burn? Very few if any newspapers turn a profit any longer, and they are folding all over the country, not because they aren’t profitable enough but because they are going bankrupt.
Maybe Ezra and Dan Rather are right and the government should be subsidizing the news media.
Zifnab
@liberal:
http://www.newamerica.net/files/archive/Pub_File_969_1.pdf
Apparently, broadcasters use the airwaves rent free. They simply stake a claim to a spectrum awarded by the FCC and that’s that. See the last example on page 2.
http://www.betanews.com/article/FCC-D-Block-bidders-driven-away-by-prospects-of-high-lease-fees-penalties/1209409924
Another example of a (failed) leasing agreement for public airwaves.
I mean, to a degree there’s only so much any given individual can do with public airwaves. You can flip on your HAM radio and do your own little private broadcast, but if you want to be heard outside your own city block, you’re going to have to spend a lot more on equipment.
Corporations control the airwaves because they can afford to set up the equipment to broadcast over them. It’s kinda first-come first-serve in that regard. NBC, CBS, and ABC were the original broadcasters who claimed the prime spectrum. Fox and WB stepped in to take higher UHF ranges. And then you’ve got upstart broadcasters that – from time to time – have a go at a channel of their own. I believe we’ve got a channel called My20 which has gone through a series of hands, but has rarely been profitable.
The spectrum space still exists to operate a new network broadcast channel (not as clear as the big 3, but still usable) but there is a very high cost barrier of entry into the market. That’s never going away for network TV.
wilfred
@sparky:
I just finished reading “The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst”, quite interesting and informative about the NYC newspaper world of the late 19th century. It’s clear that newspapers were once strongly and clearly associated with political parties, much more than they are today.
I doubt anyone would mind taking such positions; it’s the obfuscating and non-partisan pretensions that pisses everybody off.
Trinity
@jwb: Yes.
Keith G
@jwb: Yep. Error messages and adds everywhere. This is the 1st thread I could comment on as the other comment boxes were covered with adds.
I emailed the boss.
tess
Anyone else remember David Letterman trying to bring a fruit basket to GE headquarters after they bought NBC in 1986? He spends the last two minutes of the piece highlighting “the official General Electric corporate handshake.” He used that footage at the end of every show for at least a year.
I was 15 at the time, pretty caught up in my own personal dramas, but that’s the first time I remember thinking, “corporate America sucks.” That the suckiness would ooze down to the news divisions was pretty inevitable.
Paul Weimer
It’s depressing that the movie Network is turning out to be so damned prescient.
Violet
@inkadu:
Violet
@jwb:
That was kind of my point, that we are electing the people who vote for changes to laws that allow this kind of thing to happen. So while we don’t exactly make the laws ourselves, our elected representatives do, on our behalf. So we’re essentially responsible for what we’ve got. It’s not like we live in a dictatorship (Bush administration, notwithstanding) where someone is making decisions and we have no voice.
One of the big problems seems to be how much our elected representatives are bought and paid for by lobbyists, big corporations, etc. I think the average person is aware of this issue, and that it’s a problem, but doesn’t know what to do about it or how it can be fixed. A good start, imho, would be to have our elected representatives wear their sponsorship on their clothes, like NASCAR drivers. At least we’d know who was paying them.
inkadu
@Violet: Let me rephrase in a more wordy and less snarky way.
You can’t get a show on MSNBC to promote your anti-corporate interest idea, because your idea is anti-corporate interest. The media controls the message. You can not have a national movement without media support. American people are stupid and ignorant, but even if they weren’t it would be a serious uphill fight in public interest and opinion to reform media ownership rules.
Word Press sucks my balls. Also.
Mojotron
apologies to Joe Jack Talcum
Please let me tell you
They own our homes, they own our banks
We take out loans
to buy them tanks
They own our children, they own our pets
They own Jake Tapper and Ryan Seacrest
They own our rugs and our iPods
There ain’t nothin’ they haven’t got
They own the papers and the TVs
The water works, record companies
Let me remind you
They own the talk shows
They make the rules
They own Morning Joe and The View
They own the state, they own the bibles
They pick the winners on American Idol
They own the Christians, they own the Jews
They screwed up the comments on Balloon Juice
They put the holes in our socks
They put that snake in my mail box
From the halls of Montezuma to the houses on C Street
We are all tools
of the conspiracy
From the littlest baby to the biggest V.I.P.
We are all tools of the conspiracy
west coast
Media consolidation (ownership of all media by a few large corporations) is the direct result of the Clinton administration’s policies, which were a result of Dick Morris’ brilliant “triangulation” which meant giving Republicans what they wanted whenever possible.
So Clinton repealed anti-trust rules that prevented one company from controlling too much media in any given market and that prevented vertical monopolies, and the result is that pretty much all electronic media is owned by one of five major corporations, (Disney, GE, Viacom, NewsCorp, ClearChannel) and our newspapers have become print versions of local television news.
So we now know less about what’s going on that will change our lives, but more about the lives of celebrities.
PanAmerican
It’s always been so. NBC was formed by GE, RCA and Westinghouse in 1926. Capital and production costs are the drivers. Government owned broadcast is the same load of shit without the middlemen.
Broadcast news has always had editorial slant. They marketed it otherwise to contrast with print. Reactionary print idiots like Hurst, McCormick and Luce made it an effective pitch.
A complete fantasy that independent broadcast did loads of quality journalism. Prior to FOX (and Univision) low power TV was an endless loop of Three Stooges and Gilligan’s Island and outside of all-news format (or is it all traffic with some news, weather and commercials), radio stations have never done much more than a short network news feed at the top of every hour.
ruemara
um, the american public neither pays attention to it’s government nor understands it’s laws and policies.
ergo, you have no news channels that are not beholden to corporate interests and therefore, you have no news.
fish
How is it that our public airwaves are completely controlled by large companies?
When exactly was this not true?
low-tech cyclist
You can thank Ronald Reagan’s FCC chair, Mark Fowler. He’s the guy who really got the ball rolling on this.
30 years ago, one company was limited to owning something like 7 TV stations and 7 radio stations – and they couldn’t be in the same cities where that company owned newspapers.
Mark
@Wilfred
You’re probably right, but that’s three more than last year. And one of the three is Northern Virginia, where I live.
Maus
“How the hell did this happen? How is it that our public airwaves are completely controlled by large companies?”
When was this not the case? The difference isn’t so much that there has been more control, but that the level of “infotainment” has gone up and obliterated all useful news.
west coast
Maus: When was this not the case?
20 years ago.
west coast
PanAmerican: A complete fantasy that independent broadcast did loads of quality journalism.
Not quite. Here in Los Angeles if you wanted to know what was going on locally you tuned into Gene Autry’s locally owned-and-operated station, KTLA or Metromedia’s KTTV. We had three network affiliates, but they were awful at covering local news. Now that KTLA is owned by Tribune Company and KTTV is owned by Fox they’re as bad as everyone else.
Consider this: Both KTLA (5) and the LA Times are owned by Sam Zell via Tribune. KTTV (11) and KCOP (13) are owned by Rupert Murdoch via NewsCorp via Fox Broadcasting. KCBS (2) and KCAL (9) are owned by Sumner Redstone via CBS Corp (Sumner also owns Viacom which owns Paramount and the MTV Networks). Three individuals control 5 of our 7 stations and the only newspaper in America’s second largest city. Three guys.
What suffers is local coverage, and here in Los Angeles that matters a bunch because we have the five most powerful politicians in America, the LA County Board of Supervisors, each of whom represents more than the total population of Rhode Island without being answerable to any other branch of government. They rule supreme, and we never get to learn what they’re up to any more.
You don’t have to be working in national or international news to do “quality journalism,” and here in LA our local coverage has declined with the media consolidation that Clinton enabled and encouraged.
brantl
When we elect Republicans who not only allow but worship over-large companies, they promote monopolism. They have since the 1950s. What’s new?
hoosierteachergirl
As to your question: “how is it that our public airwaves are completely controlled by large companies?”
Here’s a scary piece of advice – get used to this sort of thing. “No Child Left Behind” allows for charter schools, which are becoming more and more popular all over the US.
Public schools get their financing from local, state, and federal government funds. In most cases, they must admit all students who live within the borders of their district. As a result of those funding mechanisms, public schools must be accountable to the same constitutional law to which all such public agencies are accountable.
Charter schools began appearing in the early 90s and then started rockin’ with no child left behind. They are autonomous, “alternative” public schools started by parents, teachers, community organizations, and for-profit companies (can you sense the danger coming?…). These schools RECEIVE TAX DOLLARS but the sponsoring group must also come up with private funding. Charter schools must adhere to the basic curricular requirements of the state but are free from many of the regulations that apply to conventional schools and the day-to-day scrutiny of school boards and government authorities, including many of the parameters of nclb.
Considered “cutting edge”, charter schools are touted as a challenge to standard education practices and sometimes specialize in a particular area, such as technology, the arts, or a back-to-basics core-subjects approach. Some charter schools are specifically for gifted or high-risk kids. They are also touted as offering smaller classes and more individual attention than conventional public schools. With some exception, because of the lack of oversight, many of these schools end up folding.
The reality is, they end up with the same problems the public schools continue to encounter. In the end, they are an extremely expensive experiment. More flushing of public funding and wasted time & energy when we should be thinking about real reform.
Imagine the danger in a corporation-owned (directly associated with investment-related companies) education system in America. First, in light of the last year’s events, imagine how well that would work in the face of a crashing banking and financial system. Second, what factors would most influence the curriculum, the teachers’ methods and logistics, the budgets, the pay systems, etc.? Finally, and most scary to me, is – what happens when that most basic criteria of the American education system (that it is a democratic – little “d” – institution) becomes not democratic anymore? What will happen to the requirement of a “free and appropriate education” for all? Into what direction is that sending our future generations? Our future capitalist ideology? How does that affect the nature and intention of this “democratic” nation?
When I see people flocking to these schools with high expectations, I think of the many steps being taken backward and the jillions spent. Charter schools are not the answer. WE NEED CHANGE and reform of the education systems in America. It has to stay public and accountable, and it has to stay democratic. I have been hoping for the best with Obama on this issue. I pray he means “change” when he says it. I’m still waiting.
RememberNovember
I’ve never heard any teacher say anything good about NCLB. A total boondoggle slipped in by a C student President.