On a recent NBC's "Meet the Press," Attorney General Richard Thornburgh said he wanted the authority to examine telephone records of reporters who may have been leaked information from the government. Thornburgh obviously wants to chill a reporter's zeal in chronicling government misdeeds, but he doesn't have to trash the First Amendment to do that. Reporters, according to recent articles by Ben Bagdikian in The Nation and The Progressive, pretty much chill themselves out when it comes to investigating the activities of the first three estates.
It's not due to character flaws in the reporters, who today are far better educated than earlier generations, are fairly scrupulous, and on the whole take their vocation seriously. It's the institutions they work for. First, some numbers. A dozen corporations control half the circulation of the nation's 1600 newspapers; a half dozen control most of the revenue of the country's 11,000 magazines. Three major studios have most of the movie business; six book publishers have most of the book sales; three companies have most of the television audience and revenue.
As Bagdikian points out, owners of these giants "seldom appoint [editors] likely to be interested in emphasizing those events...that undermine the owners' political and economic interests." For example, William Kovach, until recently editor of the Atlanta Constitution & Journal, was hired "to be fearless and make his paper the best in the country." When he started printing stories about problems in Atlanta, he was squeezed out -- and it took no memos from the owners to let the staff know which kinds of stories would and would not make the pages.
This, of course, leads to a great deal of self-censorship in the media. In 1980, at least one third of the members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors did not feel free to print news harmful to the parent corporation of their paper. Given the massive conglomeration of media corporations in the last few years, one-third is probably a conservative number.
Thornburgh doesn't have to clamp down on reporters; their employers and the capitalist system that employs them already do. The result is that we don't get the really important news, the news that "afflicts the comfortable" and allows people to make real decisions that empower them. Alternative publications offer some relief, but most people get their news from the biggies, and that news usually supports the status quo and soothes, not sharpens, debate. So, our press is "free" in that we don't have official restrictions; but it's decidedly unfree because the money that controls it won't let us hear the inside story of the American empire, which is the only real story in town. What government can't do, money has, and that makes us all poorer.
Neptune
Ethics In The School: Part II