April 1, 2005

At Length

Buying the News
By James Preston Allen, Publisher

     Over the years, I have often been asked by some enterprising entrepreneur when talking about buying advertising for their business, “So how do I buy the front page?” My standard answer is—“you can’t afford it.” When pressed further I usually tell them they have three options, you can either rob the local bank, die as either a prominent citizen or in some horribly gruesome manner or they can buy the newspaper from me at some exhortative price and put themselves on the cover. To date all have declined my suggestions. My point is the news in this newspaper is not for sale! Unfortunately this is not true everywhere.
     Mark Twain, America’s most celebrated man of letters, understood it more than 100 years ago and he never owned a newspaper or a television or a radio. Even Upton Sinclair, the author of The Jungle, understood it in 1924 when he wrote the book The Brass Check about the corporate ownership of the media. Ben Bagdikian knew about it when he wrote Media Monopoly in the 1980s. Which is that if you have enough money or power you can buy whatever kind of news or journalist to write the news that you want.
     Planted stories that affect the price of shares on the stock market, articles on oil that make the price of gas jump or even stories that make the country go to war—remember William Randolph Hearst and the sinking of the battleship Maine? To this day, historians can’t agree whether or not the Maine was blown up in Havana, Cuba by Spanish saboteurs or by the crew mishandling their own munitions. Nevertheless, the country went to war inspired by Hearst’s “yellow journalism.”
     Does this sound anything like the New York Times’ writer Judith Miller harping on WMDs before the recent Iraqi invasion? Was she paid to write this by the Bush administration, like they paid Armstrong Williams to write about the “no child left behind” stories for which he was paid $240,000?
     Then there is the problem with nationally syndicated columnists Maggie Gallagher and Michael McManus who were exposed for accepting payments (or shall we say bribes) to push Bush’s marriage initiative. Gallagher received $21,500 from the Department of Health and Human Services to write propaganda materials and to write an article in Crisis magazine in 2002. McManus was paid $10,000 to promote the same initiative in several columns and then to appear with Gallagher “on CBS, CNN, and MSNBC at least seven times in 2002 and 2003,” according to Salon.com’s senior writer Eric Boehlert.
     These revelations along with the ones about the use of video press releases from Governor Schwarzeneggar’s office being broadcast without any attribution to their source are deceitful. Even the latest one about Florida’s Governor Jeb Bush paying the Tallahassee broadcast journalist Mike Visilinda $100,000 for public relations work really calls into question some fundamental issues of integrity and separation of powers in the news media. Is it any wonder that fewer and fewer people read a newspaper or watch the news?
     It’s not the problem of having so many more options to get the news, either, as is so often intimated by the Poynter Institute or other media industry think tanks. The real problem is that the people sooner or later begin to smell a bad deal like something that they stepped in on their front lawn. There are so many channels but so little truth. There should be a law that mandates financial disclosure for all broadcast programs and printed articles when they are being paid for. The uncomfortable issue for Americans is that when a journalist is paid to write something by a corporation to influence public opinion, it should be called bribery; and when it’s the government paying, it should be called propaganda. The bottom line is that it is all corruption and it just goes to show the kind of “moral integrity” the Bushites are willing to stoop to hoodwink the American public.
     This, as I’ve indicated, isn’t anything new but a recurring theme. Under the regime of Ronald “the great communicator” Reagan, we had the Office of Public Diplomacy to distract the media from the Iran-Contra scandal and Ollie North’s arms for drugs deals. Just the other week Boy George brought back his old pal from Texas, Karen Hughes, to head up the improved “Office of Public Diplomacy” under Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The only difference between the two offices is that the first one was located in the White House basement and this one moved across the street to the State Department. Appearances are everything in producing propaganda, isn’t it?
     It appears to me that the most dangerous person in America today is not the terrorist bomber intent on blowing up the airport, but the one who refuses to stop asking honest questions and reporting the truth to the public. The truth is mightier than the bomb.