The Ehrlich Report

Confused by the news? That’s the way it’s supposed to be. Feel better now?

Now most people think that the role of newspapers and TV news is to report on the events of the day. That’s not entirely wrong. The major role of the news media is to make money for those who own and control them. Presenting stories and pictures is one way, and a highly profitable way, to attract people. The money comes by “selling” readers and viewers to advertisers. The more people reading and watching, the more expensive the ads.

Of course, to get people to read or watch, the editors and producers have to tell a story or picture some event that will sustain people between the ads. These are your first two lessons. First, that the mass media are large, concentrated businesses whose primary objective is to make money. So it was a short while ago, for example, that the second largest newspaper chain in the country, Knight Ridder, was sold by its stockholders. Why? Not because they weren’t profitable. They were netting more profit than the average Fortune 500 company. They were sold because they weren’t making enough profit to satisfy the investment capitalists.

Your second lesson is that advertising is the primary income source of the mass news media. And you know what that means. It means that the news producers try to do nothing that will in any way offend or disturb their audience. More than that, it means that the advertisers have significant control over what gets published. No wonder then, some 41 percent of reporters, in a Columbia Journalism Review survey, said that they had purposely avoided newsworthy stories or changed the tone of a story in keeping with their newspaper’s policies or editor’s politics. As one African American reporter told me of her editor, “He wants me to write white.”

Large scale corporate controls of media ownership and their interlocking directorates further throw into question matters of fairness, balance, and accuracy. The Washington Post shares board members with Lockheed Martin, Coca Cola, Dun & Bradstreet, Gillette, G.E. Investments, J.P. Morgan, and Moody’s. General Electric (NBC) shares board members with Anheuser-Busch, Avon, Bechtel, Chevron/Texaco, Coca Cola, Dell, GM, Home Depot, Kellogg, J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, Motorola, and Procter & Gamble. These, of course, are just examples of the corporate media structures. Can we seriously believe that editors are not influenced by these networks of power and influence?

Where does the news come from? That’s lesson three. While Hollywood and TV have been very good about depicting the hard-working news hound wading through the muck or foreign correspondent risking her life, most news is prepackaged or delivered or at the other end of a telephone. Government and large corporations or “authorities” funded and certified by them are the major providers of news. Press releases, video news releases, unidentified sources, embedded reporters, columnists paid to promote government policies–these are sample categories of the modes of news control.

Another mode of control is blatantly ideological and not easily discerned, at least by a white audience. While TV news anchors these days are typically “mixed” by gender and ethnicity, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians are virtually invisible as news sources or authority figures. This is true in both local and network news. (The National Association of Hispanic Journalists and The Prejudice Institute have both documented this.) A more openly political form of news control derives from the White House’s obsession with terrorism. By and large the news media have been a handmaiden to the militarists by softball interviews and by actually concealing news in the interests of “national security.”

There is one other mechanism of propaganda and news media control and that is the process of manufacturing “disinformation.” I first encountered the term in Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. It is of prime importance when analyzing TV news. It refers to misleading information. It is a category of information that is misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial. Disinformation creates the illusion of knowing something, but, in fact, leads the viewer away from knowing. Baltimore TV is especially adept at this focusing as it almost always does on photogenic events while ignoring the underlying issues.

The penultimate form of news control is that of not reporting the story. For the news reader or viewer, the story that doesn’t get reported is worse yet than the silent fall of that tree in the forest. The untold story steals knowledge and by its absence and distorts the public agenda. I know of no better argument for the existence of Independent Media Centers and the alternative press.
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