The Ehrlich Report
December 2006

MANIPULATING THE NEWS MEDIA

We live in a media environment constantly bombarded by words and images. Much of it is designed to manipulate our behavior. Consider that a new book is published in the US every half hour. And while that is being printed, 2,100 new blogs will be established. That amounts to more than 100,000 new blogs every day. Equally manipulative is the withholding of the words and images that we need to be self-directed. The job of a news junkie isn’t getting easier.

The last several weeks have revealed a textbook illustration of news media manipulation. First, there was the book that didn’t get published. O.J. Simpson, whose murder trial had captivated the country and divided black and white, wrote a book detailing how the murder of his wife and her male companion might have taken place If I Did It. That was the title of the book. And a major editor, Judith Regan, of a major press (HarperCollins) had agreed to publish it.

There is a manifestly immoral aspect to writing and profiting from such a book given, especially, the widespread belief that Simpson, despite the jury verdict, was the perpetrator. For reasons that we will likely never know, enter Rupert Murdoch. The founder and principal of News Corporation, Murdoch and his sons control the fifth largest media conglomerate in the world, and that includes eight book publishers including HarperCollins. Murdoch said “no” to the book publication, even though Amazon claimed 20,000 advance orders, and for now the book is in limbo.

The importance of this incident is the role of one man. Is it too conspiratorial to raise the question: What if the six corporate heads of these mega media were to consult and agree not to publish a specific book, or program–or a political manifesto?

The second case stands as a partial answer to this question. It is the case of Al Jazeera., the Arab-language TV news network based in Qatar and broadcast in the Middle East and many other parts of the world. Assembling an English-speaking cast including a former Nightline reporter as anchor, they sought a cable channel for broadcast here in the states. So far not a single cable network will provide them with program time.

Of course not all media control involves access. This Week magazine (November 24) used a headline to frame a story with the peculiar headline “Boring but important.” The subhead identifies the story, “Persisting racial disparities.” The two column inch story is otherwise a straightforward reporting of what was likely a Census Bureau press release. The story was important revealing that the socioeconomic disparities between Black, White and Hispanic have increased over the past 25 years. Apparently the headline editor had to make sure that readers knew this was boring.

Unfortunately, most newspapers can’t cope adequately with the reporting of race and ethnic issues. Only about half of them have a race beat, and that means when events of any complexity surface they lack the experience or training to deal with it adequately. An example of that appeared in the Baltimore Examiner (November 27). The story dealt with the FBI’s release of hate crimes statistics for the year 2005. Actually, the FBI’s report was at least two months old and available in full on the agency’s website. The theme of the Examiner’s article was that hate crimes in Maryland had decreased last year. Omitted from the article was the fact that of the 150 police agencies in the state, only 29 reported hate crimes to the FBI. Also missing from the article is reference to the fact that Maryland is one of the leading states for anti-Moslem hate crimes. Neglected, too, was the observation that most hate crimes and incidents are not reported to the police. This observation was not in the FBI report, but a knowledgeable beat reporter would have known this from past studies.

These cases underscore the need for an alternative and oppositional news media. IndyMedia is one such alternative, and in a future report I will present my critique and suggestions for IMC. Meanwhile, Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the US, threatens to coopt IndyMedia by instituting a program of what they call “citizen journalism,” mining the web for stories, and creating internet databases and calendars.