The Fourth Estate

 The Fourth Estate

Features » July 11, 2008

 Is the Fourth Estate a Fifth Column?
Corporate media colludes with democracy’s demise
                           By Bill Moyers

Without a free and independent press, this 250-year-old
experiment in self-government will not make it. As journalism
goes, so goes
democracy!!!

I heard this story a long
time ago, growing up in
Choctaw County in
Oklahoma before my family
moved to Texas. A tribal
elder was telling his
grandson about the battle
the old man was waging within himself. He said, “It is between
two wolves, my son. One is an evil wolf: anger, envy, sorrow,
greed, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies, false pride, superiority
and ego. The other is the good wolf: joy, peace, love, hope,
serenity, humility, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and
faith.”

The boy took this in for a few minutes and then asked his
grandfather, “Which wolf won?”

The old Cherokee replied simply, “The one I feed.”

Democracy is that way. The wolf that wins is the one we feed.
And in our society, media provides the fodder.

Our media institutions, deeply embedded in the power
structures of society, are not providing the information that we
need to make our democracy work. To put it another way,
corporate media
consolidation is a
corrosive social force.
It robs people of their
voice in public affairs
and pollutes the political
culture. And it turns the
debates about profound
issues into a shouting
match of polarized views
promulgated by
partisan apologists who trivialize democracy while refusing to
speak the truth about how our country is being plundered.

Our dominant media are ultimately accountable only to
corporate boards whose mission is not life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness for the whole body of our republic, but the
aggrandizement of corporate executives and shareholders.

These organizations’ self-styled mandate is not to hold public
and private power accountable, but to aggregate their
interlocking interests. Their reward is not to help fulfill the social
compact embodied in the notion of “We, the people,” but to
manufacture news and information as profitable consumer
commodities.

Democracy without honest information creates the illusion of
popular consent at the same time that it enhances the power of
the state and the privileged interests that the state protects.
And nothing characterizes corporate media today more than its
disdain toward the fragile nature of modern life and its
indifference toward the complex social debate required of a
free and self-governing people.

Let’s look at what is happening with the Internet. This spring
the cable giant Comcast tried to pack a Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) hearing on network
neutrality by hiring strangers off the street to ensure that
advocates of net neutrality would not be able to get a seat in
the hearing room.

SaveTheInternet.com — a bipartisan coalition — and its
supporters helped expose the ruse. Soon after, there was a
new hearing, this time without the gerrymandering seating by
opponents of an open Internet.

Now Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has introduced a bill to
advance network neutrality, and it has become an issue in the
presidential campaign.

We must be vigilant. The fate of the cyber-commons — the
future of the mobile Web and the benefits of the Internet as
open architecture — is up for grabs. And the only antidote to
the power of organized money in Washington is the power of
organized people at the net roots.

When Verizon tried to censor NARAL’s (National Abortion
Rights Action League) use of text messaging last year, it was
quick action by Save the Internet that led the company to
reverse its position. Those efforts also led to an FCC
proceeding on this issue.

Wherever the Internet flows — on PCs, cell phones, mobile
devices and, very soon, new digital television sets — we must
ensure that it remains an open and nondiscriminatory medium
of expression.

By 2011, the market analysts tell us, the Internet will surpass
newspapers in advertising revenues. With MySpace and Dow
Jones controlled by News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch,
Microsoft determined to acquire Yahoo!, and with advertisers
already telling some bloggers, “Your content is unacceptable,”
we could potentially lose what’s now considered an
unstoppable long tail of content offering abundant, new,
credible and sustainable sources of news and information.

So, what will happen to news in the future, as the already
tattered boundaries between journalism and advertising is
dispensed with entirely and as content programming,
commerce and online communities are rolled into one profitably
attractive package?

Last year, the investment firm of Piper Jaffray predicted that
much of the business model for new media would be just that
kind of hybrid. They called it “communitainment.” (Oh, George
Orwell, where are you now that we need you?)

Across the media landscape, the health of our democracy is
imperiled. Buffeted by gale force winds of technological,
political and demographic forces, without a truly free and
independent press, this 250-year-old experiment in self-
government will not make it. As journalism goes, so goes
democracy.

Mergers and buyouts change both old and new media. They
bring a frenzied focus on cost-cutting, while fattening the
pockets of the new owners and their investors. The result:
journalism is degraded through the layoffs and buyouts of
legions of reporters and editors.

Advertising Age reports that U.S. media employment has fallen
to a 15-year low. The Los Angeles Times alone has
experienced a withering series of resignations by editors who
refused to turn a red pencil into an editorial scalpel.

The new owner of the Tribune Company, real estate mogul
Sam Zell, recently toured his new property Los Angeles Times,
telling employees in the newsroom that the challenge is this:
How do we get somebody 126 years old to get it up? “Well,”
said Zell, “I’m your Viagra.”

He told his journalists that he didn’t have an editorial agenda or
a perspective about newspapers’ roles as civic institutions. “I’m
a businessman,” he said. “All what matters in the end is the
bottom line.”

Zell then told Wall Street analysts that to save money he
intends to eliminate 500 pages of news a week across all of
the Tribune Company’s 12 papers. That can mean eliminating
some 82 editorial pages every week just from the Los Angeles
Times. What will he use to replace reporters and editors? He
says to the Wall Street analysts, “I’ll use maps, graphics, lists,
rankings and stats.” Sounds as if Zell has confused Viagra with
Lunesta.

Former Baltimore Sun journalist and creator of HBO’s The
Wire, David Simon, chronicled the effect that crosscutting and
consolidation has had in media businesses and on the
communities where those businesses have made so much
money. He wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, “I did not
encounter a sustained period in which anyone endeavored to
spend what it would actually cost to make the Baltimore Sun
the most essential and deep-thinking and well-written account
of life in central Maryland. The people you needed to gather for
that kind of storytelling were ushered out the door, buyout after
buyout.”

Or as journalist Eric Alterman recently wrote in the New
Yorker: “It is impossible not to wonder what will become of not
just news but democracy itself, in a world in which we can no
longer depend on newspapers to invest their unmatched
resources and professional pride in helping the rest of us to
learn, however imperfectly, what we need to know.”

For example, we needed to know the truth about Iraq. The
truth could have spared that country from rack and ruin, saved
thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi
lives, and freed hundreds of billions of dollars for investment in
the American economy and infrastructure.

But as reporters at Knight Ridder — one of the few
organizations that systematically and independently set out to
challenge the claims of the administration — told us at the time,
and as my colleagues and I reported in our PBS documentary
Buying the War, and as Scott McClellan has now confessed,
and as the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed in June,
the Bush administration deceived Americans into supporting an
unprovoked war on another country. And it did so using
erroneous and misleading intelligence — and with the
complicity of the dominant media. It has led to a conflict that,
instead of being over quickly and bloodlessly as predicted,
continues to this day into its sixth year.

We now know that a neoconservative is an arsonist who sets a
house on fire and six years later boasts that no one can put it
out. You couldn’t find a more revealing measure of the state of
the dominant media today than the continuing ubiquitous
presence on the air and in print of the very pundits and experts,
self-selected message multipliers of a disastrous foreign
policy, who got it all wrong in the first place. It just goes to
show, when the bar is low enough, you can never be too wrong.

The dominant media remains in denial about their role in
passing on the government’s unverified claims as facts. That’s
the great danger. It’s not simply that they dominate the story
we tell ourselves publicly every day. It’s that they don’t allow
other alternative competing narratives to emerge, against
which the people could measure the veracity of all the claims.

Now the dominant media is saying, “Well, we did ask. We did
do our job by asking tough questions during the run-up to the
war.”

But I’ve been through the transcripts. And I’ll tell you, you will
find very few tough questions. And if you come across them,
you will discover that they were asked of the wrong people.

John Walcott, Washington bureau chief for McClatchy, formerly
Knight Ridder, recently said of his colleagues in the dominant
media, “They asked a lot of questions, but they asked even the
right questions of the wrong people.” They were asked of the
sources who had cooked the intelligence books in the first
place or who had memorized the White House talking points
and were prepared to answer every tough question with a soft
evasion or an easy lie, swallowed by a gullible questioner.

Following the March 2003 invasion, Vice President Dick
Cheney dropped into a media dinner to thank the guests for
their all-the-war-all-the-time coverage of the contrived and
manufactured war.

Sadly, in many respects, the Fourth Estate has become the
fifth column of democracy, colluding with the powers that be in
a culture of deception that subverts the thing most necessary
to freedom, and that is the truth.

But we’re not alone and we know what we need to say. So let
us all go tell it on the mountains and in the cities. From our
websites and laptops, the street corners and coffeehouses, the
delis and diners, the factory floors and the bookstores. On
campus, at the mall, the synagogue, sanctuary and mosque, let’
s tell it where we can, when we can and while we still can.

Democracy only works when ordinary people claim it as their
own.

This article was adapted from Bill Moyers’ keynote address at
the National Conference for Media Reform Conference in
Minneapolis on June 7. You can read and respond to the full
speech at www.pbs.org/moyers.

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Bill Moyers is the president of the Schumann Center for Media
and Democracy and the host of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.

More information about Bill Moyers
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Posted by swirlaround on Jul 11, 2008 at 6:43 AM
Although we’ve put men on the moon, and unleashed the
destructive power of the atom, in practice, it seems to never
occur to us that those same Laws we’ve operated to reach
those potentialities, come out of the same Cosmic paradigm,
which immutably operates with omnipotence in the affairs of
Man!  However, the human ego, with its affinity for possession,
and segregation of phenomena, is in a constant state of peril
for all that it claims, while not knowing, or seeking the
substance of what it purports to be real!

But if we are to even come close to solving any one of these
monumental problems that afflict society, we must first face the
fact that a complex solution (attempting to solve problems by
their particulars) is for those who obscure by relativism, and do
not want to face the more profound difficulty of the “simple”!

Posted by DofG on Jul 12, 2008 at 12:46 PM
Dear Mr. Moyers,

Thank you so much for this piece, they are very few real
journalists left in the ” big media ” in America today, and you
are one of them.

Let’s not forget that even The New-York Times was part of the
propaganda campaign that made Americans buy into the lies of
the Bush administartion in the build up to the Iraq war.

You can still find ” real news “, but you have to look for it and ”
digg” for sources on the web and in international publications or
here on PBS and NPR news.

Thanks again for your great work.

Posted by MercyPolitics on Jul 12, 2008 at 1:14 PM
No outlet is immune to this kind of behavior, it’s happening
across the board. The FMC id doing it’s part in DC, Bil is a
voicebut, he has his finger on the zeitgeist of the regular
American Spoonfed Citizen. The average Joe knows he’s fed
full of nonsense.
Then again, here is an excerpt from every websites posting
agreement.:

“We reserve the right to publish any postings in the print edition
of our magazine and in promotional materials.

By registering at this site you agree not to post any messages
that are obscene, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, threatening, or
that violate any laws. We will permanently ban all users who do
so.  

We reserve the right to remove, edit, or move any messages
for any reason.”

Kinda says it all, doesn’t it?

Posted by Zippy the giver on Jul 12, 2008 at 3:04 PM
Bill,

At least you’re not calling for the repeal of the First Amendment
and the imposition of local government press controls as a
result of the corporate media mess.  

I’m no fan of Sam Zell, but I think the Chicago Tribune, where
the editorial board called for the repeal of the Second
Amendment,  is way out of touch with the average Chicagoan
and long due for some editorial cuts.

Posted by AlbertParsons on Jul 12, 2008 at 9:18 PM
extended discussion >>>Continued...Discussions with more
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John Peter Zenger
"Freedom of the Press"

ZENGER, John Peter, printer, born in Germany about 1680;
died in New York city in 1746. He came to this country about
1700, and was an apprentice in the printing-office of William
Bradford the elder. On 5 November, 1733, he began the
publication of the "New York Weekly Journal." This paper was
the organ of the party that was opposed to the governor of the
province, and was powerfully supported by Chief-Justice Lewis
Norris, Rip Van Dam, and James Alexander. It abounded in
lampoons and pasquinades that attracted wide attention, and
attacked the government with severity, contributing greatly
toward loosening the bonds between England and the colonies.
On 17 November, 1734, Zenger was arrested and imprisoned
by virtue of a warrant from Governor William Cosby and the
council for "printing and publishing" several seditious libels."
The house of assembly refused to concur with the governor,
and he ordered the mayor to burn the papers containing the
alleged libels by aid of the hangman. The order was obeyed,
but by the sheriff's servant, not the hangman, and the jury
failing to find an indictment against Zenger, the attorney-
general was directed to file an information against him for the
said libels at the next term of the court. His political friends
employed Andrew Hamilton, of Philadelphia, to plead his
cause, which proved at the same time to be the question of the
liberty of the press in America, and all the central colonies
regarded the controversy as their own. (See HAMlLTON,
ANDREW.) At the trial the publishing was confessed, but
Hamilton justified the publication by asserting its truth. " You
cannot be permitted, ;' interrupted the chief justice, "to give the
truth of a libel in evidence." " Then," said Hamilton to the jury,
"we appeal to you for witnesses of the facts. The jury have a
right to determine both the law and the fact, and they ought to
do so. The question before you is not the cause of a poor
printer, nor of New York alone; it is the cause of liberty, the
liberty of opposing arbitrary power by speaking and writing
truth." The jury gave their verdict "not guilty," and Zenger,
released from his imprisonment of thirty-five weeks, was
received with tumultuous applause by a concourse of people
who had assembled to learn the result. This event has been
termed "the morn-lag-star of that liberty which subsequently
revolutionized America." After his death Zenger's widow and
his son John conducted the "Journal" until 1752. A narrative of
the trial was published with that of William Owen (Boston,
1765).




Edited Appletons Encyclopedia, Copyright © 2001
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