Public Broadcasting, however, has the potential to surpass even Fox. Think what a network under the control of a Republican Congress and a Republican White House will one day be capable of doing. Money buys a very long view.
Until recently, it 's my feeling that a lot of the control exerted was purely economic. By insisting that newsgathering and journalism --which in the past had been viewed as loss-leaders and part of the price of doing business --achieve profit margins similar to the selling of soap and cereal, corporate executives effectively insured superficial coverage without ever taking a red pencil to an editorial. According to an article in the New Yorker by Ken Auletta [October 10,2005], high profit targets and consequent cuts in personnel have been at the heart of a conflict at the LA Times.
The corporate executives in the case scoff at such an elitist caricature of the dispute:
Journalists express dismay that bottom-line pressures are reducing the quality of news coverage. What this actually means is that when competition is intense, providers of a service are forced to give the consumer what he or she wants, not what they, as proud professionals, think the consumer should want, or, more bluntly, what they want.
But now, taking the next step, failure to hit profit targets not only means cutting people, but direct intervention in shaping editorial content, a significant benchmark in corporate management of the message. Tribune chain executives cashiered the LA Times ' liberal columnist Robert Scheer in favor of a rightwing columnist Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism. (Have you noticed that there 's been a lot of rightwing effort to co-opt and nullify the word fascist lately?) Scheer says that the publisher who fired him, Jeff Johnson "is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he 's a right winger who supported the war . . . who told people two years ago he couldn 't stand a word that I wrote. "
The entire Knight-Ridder chain, which includes the Daily News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Miami Herald, is allegedly facing sale because of irritation in some quarters with the negative stories they 've been breaking. The feeling on the right seems to be if you don 't like the news, buy a paper and change it.
The White House 's demand that news services doctor the transcript of a Scott McClellan press conference is another benchmark of sorts. If we ever get used to them tinkering with the public record, reality itself may become obsolete.
It 's time to start attacking the messengers. When Chris Matthews tells us that George W. Bush sometimes "glimmers " with "sunny nobility, " you know that the only economic competition in this market is in seeing who can kiss the most neocon butt, proof positive that media giants are no more capable of self-regulation than the coal mining industry.
Here 's another Matthews nugget: "Everybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs, maybe on the left. " And another: "I think this is the brilliant political move here by the president, forcing the Democratic carpers and complainers to come forward, and say, 'Alright, you don 't like my strategy for victory in Iraq? Vote against it. Go ahead, make my day. ' This is Clint Eastwood stuff. "
I have to ask myself, do they have something on this guy, or was he born this way? I hope for his sake it 's the former. This is the voice of the left on the network news channels, folks. When is someone going to have the guts to ask Matthews point-blank when he runs one of these numbers if he 's getting payola.
To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the media is the scandal.
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