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“an absolute explosion of the genre of media reporting and media criti

cism in the United States.”

The New York Times, the Washington Post, the

Boston Globe, and other leading newspapers now regularly report on

media behavior. Magazines like Time and The New Yorker and broadcast

media like CNN’s Reliable Sources and National Public Radio’s weekly On

the Media. also engage in media criticism.

As stated by the Washington

Post’s Howard Kurtz, the “essence” of his job was “to hold journalists

and news organizations accountable.”

Media self-criticism has become more urgent as several major news

papers admitted that their reporters violated journalistic standards. To

its great embarrassment, the prestigious New York Times faced a scandal

over years of journalistic fraud committed by its reporter Jayson Blair.

On May 11, 2003, the paper published a long article describing his

“widespread fabrication and plagiarism” in at least 36 of 73 articles

written since he started writing national news stories. These stories in

cluded the Washington-area sniper shootings and stories about the

families of U.S. military personnel serving in Iraq. While he was in New

York, his stories contained datelines from elsewhere. The management

style of its top editors and the paper’s internal processes were also at

fault. Intent on pushing affirmative action, Howell Raines, the paper’s

executive editor, gave Blair, an African American, strong encourage-

ment and support. A culture had evolved at the New York Times that

failed to respond to reported suspicions by staff members about Blair’s

reporting. Taking responsibility, Raines and Gerald M. Boyd, the man-

aging editor, resigned after 5 weeks of furor over the Blair affair. Raines

gets credit, however, for the paper’s winning of eight Pulitzer Prizes

during the 2 years he was in charge of the newsroom.

A similar problem of story fabrications occurred at USA Today, where

one of the newspaper’s star reporters, foreign correspondent Jack

Kelley, was found to have dishonestly reported dozens of articles be-

tween 1991 and 2003 and having stolen at least 100 passages from

other publications, some word for word. It was another case of the

“‘Golden Boy’ syndrome: executives coddling a charming and charis

matic star performer and ignoring repeated warnings about the reliabil

ity of his work from outsiders and insiders.” The held perception in the

newsroom was that Kelley was untouchable, partly because a “career

ism culture” at the paper led some editors to put career concerns above

the integrity of the news report.

Other publications had also reported failures of journalistic ethics.

Stephen Glass, who was associate editor at the New Republic, invented

27 of the 41 articles he wrote; Mike Barnicle, a veteran Boston Globe col

umnist, resigned after he was charged with plagiarism and fabrication;

Patricia Smith, another Boston Globe columnist, was asked to resign af

ter admitting she invented people and quotations; and CNN producers

April Oliver and Jack Smith were fired after reporting an unsupportable

two-part special accusing the Pentagon of using nerve gas against U.S.

Army defectors in Laos in 1970.

172 I CHAPTER 7

Finally, the vaunted CBS, once considered the nation’s top broadcast

news division, suffered an embarrassing lapse of professional journal

ism. In his September 8, 2004, report “For the Record,” Dan Rather

claimed on CBS’s 60 Minutes that memos proved that President Bush

shirked his National Guard Service duty. The story had special signifi

cance because it was aired in the heat of the presidential election. Within

hours of the broadcast, the CBS report was attacked, starting with con

servative websites that pointed to suspect typography (suggesting that

the “typing” was by a modern printer). Rather stood by the story and

CBS “brushed aside criticism.”

Finally, after 12 days, CBS said the use

of the documents was “a mistake” and Dan Rather admitted that CBS

could “no longer vouch” for the authenticity of the news. He apologized,

“I want to say personally and directly, I’m sorry” for the story. The

source of the documents, Bill Burkett, a retired and disgruntled National

Guard lieutenant colonel, who confessed he misled the network about

where he had obtained the documents but wouldn’t say where they

came from.

A subsequent scathing 224-page report from an independent review

panel held Mary Mapes, an award-winning producer, mainly responsi-

ble. It said that carelessness and “myopic zeal” tainted the CBS produc-

tion. In her zeal to defend the story, the report said, she ignored or

brushed aside legitimate concerns about the story regarding how thor-

oughly she personally vetted the documents and their source. Bob Steele

of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies cited other failures: heavy reli-

ance on Burkett, who had written scathing online commentaries about

Bush, and failure to uphold its “ethical responsibility” to interview key

people, such as the secretary of the supposed writer of the documents,

before rushing to air.

After the report’s release, CBS fired Mapes and

asked three senior news executives to resign. Dan Rather escaped puni-

tive action; he had previously announced plans to retire from the “Eve-

ning News” in March 2005. In blunt terms, the review panel outlines

how the news division repeatedly failed to carry out “basic journalistic

steps” to ensure accurate and fair reporting.

The business community is not wholly depending on media self-reg

ulation to achieve accountability. They are also pursuing other strate

gies to protect themselves: (a) using media monitoring and oversight

groups, (b) launching a media blitz against misrepresentation, (c) ac

quiring media ownership and membership on media boards of direc

tors, (d) engaging in public journalism, and (e) suing news

organizations that engage in libel or defamation or that use illegal

means to obtain news.

USING MEDIA MONITORING AND OVERSIGHT GROUPS

Two major types of organizations monitor the treatment of news by the

media and judge complaints made about them: media watchdogs and

news councils.

HOLDING THE MEDIA ACCOUNTABLE AND SUING I 173

Media Watchdogs

Corporations are helped by organizations that monitor and report on

the performance of the news media. Although they reflect varying po

litical persuasions, most are conservative. Among media watchdog or

ganizations are Accuracy in Media, Center for Media and Public Affairs,

Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, the Institute for Media Analysis, and

the Media Research Center.

The largest is the Media Research Center,

launched in 1987 by L. Brent Bozell, III, with the mission of promoting

balance in the “liberal media.” In 1993 it had a staff of 24 who logged

and indexed every network, CNN, and PBS newscast and talk show. It

also reviewed 50 magazines, five major dailies, and the wire services. Its

public reporting was conducted mainly through “Notable Quotables,” a

twice-monthly collection of quotes intended to reflect reporters’ liberal

biases, and a monthly newsletter, MediaWatch, with a circulation of

27,000. In 1990 it published a book, And That’s the Way It Isn’t: A Refer-

ence Guide to Media Bias.

Dan Rather has become very aware of conservative media activists

like the Media Research Center’s Bozell, noting they are “all over your

telephones, all over your e-mail, all over your mail,” and it “creates an

undertow in which you say to yourself ‘you know, I think we’re right

on this story, I think we’ve got it in the right context, I think we’ve got it

in the right perspective, but we better pick another day.…”

Peter

Jennings expressed this apprehension by saying he sensed a degree of

“anxiety in the newsroom, and I think it comes in part from the corpo-

rate suite.”

And Tom Brokaw likened the pressures created by Bozell’s

“pressing a button” to a “kind of tsunami.… He’s well organized, he’s

got a constituency, he’s got a newsletter, he can hit a button and we’ll

hear from him.”

Robert McNeil warns against pressure turning into a

“culture of animosity” in which “motives are attacked, morals are at-

tacked and even patriotism is questioned.”

Occasionally these watchdogs try to apply pressure on the media;

e.g., Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting took out a quarter-page op-ed ad

in the Sunday edition of the New York Times carrying the headline, “Is

Bigotry a Disney Family Value?”

Addressed to Mr. Michael D. Eisner,

chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Co., the ad attacked the racist

comments of host Bob Grant on New York City’s WABC Radio. Because

Disney owns WABC, the offending station, the ad asked Disney to make

its policies clear.

Various publications review media performance. Jude Wanniski’s

1991 Media Guide illustrates how this is done.

It reviewed more than

700 journalists and 50 publications in North America, including a com

mentary on the year’s major news stories, broadcast news, and the Can

adianpress.Itspublisherssayitsprimarypurposeistopromotequality

in journalism. The guide assigns half- to four-star ratings to a list of the

101 “highest rated journalists of 1991,” followed by roughly half-page

analyses of what each said. (See Box 7.1 for an example of contents.)

174 I CHAPTER 7

News Councils

News councils serve as informal juries to adjudicate complaints by ag

grieved parties about distorted media coverage. These councils provide

a public hearing without necessitating the cost and time required for

legal suits.

National News Council. A prototype is the former National News

Council, an independent body set up in 1973 to review the perfor

mance of the national media and to judge specific complaints about

news coverage.

Both Shell Oil and Exxon used this council to complain about

NBC-TV’s unfair coverage of the oil industry during the Arab oil crisis,

which was aired in a five-part nightly news series in the fall of 1979.

Shell’s complaint was leveled at the first broadcast, “Fly Now, Freeze

Later,” which contended some big oil companies were emphasizing the

HOLDING THE MEDIA ACCOUNTABLE AND SUING I 175

Box 7.1 Example Contents of Wanniski’s Media Guide

These analyses of journalists cover six groups: (a) commentators; (b)

financial reporters and columnists; (c) foreign correspondents; (d) na

tional security/diplomatic correspondents; (e) science, health, and en

vironment reporters (new this year); and (f) social/political reporters.

About a sixth of the book is an overview of the print media and broad

cast news, another fourth on publications, and the remainder on jour

nalists and their stories. A useful index allows a company to discover

who wrote what about the organization.

Exxon Corporation, for example, could find commentaries on six

journalists and learn that Peter Nulty of Fortune’s board of editors ear

nestly covers the energy beat and “clearly has knowledge and industry

contacts, but almost never uses them to get ahead of the curve.” His

article, “Exxon’s Problem: Not What You Think,” is described as an at

tempt “to psychoanalyze morale and the ‘leadership crisis’ at Exxon,

employing the cutesy Fortune style that makes us wince: ‘For now, at

least, Exxon is as strong as the healthiest oil-rig roustabout.’”

Wanniski’s guide also includes overall assessments of various media.

C-SPAN is MediaGuide’s choice for raw news, mainly on government.

Mother Jones, it says, is “losing ideological ground to the politically

serious In These Times and lacking the broad, eclectic spectrum of

the Utne Reader.” And kudos go to the National Interest, “this splen-

did quarterly foreign policy journal,” and for Francis Fukuyama’s

farsighted, “The End of History” (Summer 1989), that shook the intel-

ligentsia globally. It says: “The issue became a ‘cause celebre’ for ana-

lysts, commentators, and strategists everywhere.”

sale of jet fuel rather than home heating oil. The National News Council

agreed with Shell and reported, “Contrary to the impression that the

NBC report clearly intended to convey, Shell ‘acted in a responsible and

careful manner’” when it withdrew from the home heating oil market

in the Northeast.

Exxon took issue with the second segment, “Dirty Oil and Dirty Air,”

which linked the deterioration of air quality in southern Florida to the

firm’s decision to cut low-sulfur fuel shipments to Florida Power &

Light. The council agreed with Exxon that the broadcast was marked by

“factual error, the selective use of information, lack of perspective, and

the building of effect through innuendo.”

The council closed its doors in April 1984 because it felt impotent.

“The public doesn’t seem to know we’re here,” lamented Richard Salant,

former president of CBS News, who served as council president during

its last 10 months. “And worse yet, the press just didn’t think we were

very useful.” In fact, when the council dissolved itself, Creed Black, pres-

ident of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, summed up the

view held by his colleagues: “An editor is accountable to his readers, not

some self-appointed group.”

Despite this disappointment, Salant

called the News Council “a valid idea whose time has not yet come, but

will in the near future.”

As summarized in the American Journalism Review, newspaper pub-

lishers such as The New York Times, Washington Post, and the Boston Globe

have opposed the very idea of news councils for these reasons: (a) they

create another obstacle to hard-hitting stories, and some journalists opt

not to write a story for fear they will be unfairly targeted; (b) they sub-

stitute the judgment of people who don’t fully understand the field for

the judgment of trained journalists; (c) they are the first step toward

government regulation and perhaps censorship; and (c) one could not be

sure to find impartial members who would be fair to the media.

Mike Wallace unsuccessfully sought to rekindle the national news

council discussion after the bitter experience of defending himself in a

suit by General William C. Westmoreland against CBS for a 60 Minutes

segment. In it Wallace alleged the general deliberately deceived his su

periors by underestimating enemy troop strength. Westmoreland

sued, not because he wanted money, but because he wanted to vindi

cate himself.

Public hostility and cynicism toward the media have persuaded other

media people to join Wallace in reconsidering the idea. He helped bring

together NBC, CNN, CBS News, and the editors of the Detroit News and

the Louisville Courier-Journal, as well as 10 other representatives of the

media and foundations, at a Ford Foundation meeting on February 26,

1997, to discuss improving the media’s credibility and the possibility of

reviving a national news council. One of those attending, Charles

Eisendrath, director of the Michigan Journalism Fellows program at the

University of Michigan, however, favored calling it a “Committee on

Professional Standards,” not only to express how he perceived the prob

176 I CHAPTER 7

lem, but also to avoid reviving past negative attitudes toward the old

news council.

Minnesota News Council. Mike Wallace’s support of some kind of

national news council was favorably influenced by his observation of

how the Minnesota News Council, one of the two existing state-level

councils (the other is in Hawaii), handled the high-profile complaint

brought by Northwest Airlines against WCCO-TV for a three-part series

shown in spring 1996.

The Minnesota News Council consists of a balanced body of 12 jour

nalists and 12 community representatives, with a state supreme court

justice presiding over its public hearings. Its mission is to “exert a moral

influence on media behavior.”

As explained in its literature, “The News

Council serves, most of all, an idea: Fairness. We do not describe our

selves, or function, as a watchdog. We are a facilitator. Because the

power of the press is so great, we work to create a level playing field, by

getting a news outlet to come to the table as an equal with a member of

the public who wants to air a complaint.”

To qualify for a hearing, a complainant must agree not to sue regard-

less of the outcome. The council’s decision carries no legal weight, but

the verdict can embarrass the medium in question. Over its 25-year his-

tory, 2,000 complaints have been filed with the council. Of these, most

were dropped or settled after council-initiated discussion. Of the 116

that went to hearings, close to half were decided in the media’s favor.

The case Mike Wallace heard, Northwest Airlines vs. WCCO-TV, is

described in Box 7.2.

LAUNCH A MEDIA BLITZ AGAINST

MEDIA MISREPRESENTATION

When General Motors (GM) saw NBC’s falsified “Waiting to Explode”

segment on Dateline NBC, it was so enraged it outdid Herb Schmertz’s

advice to get confrontational with the media. The subsequent media

blitz organized by GM against NBC’s misrepresentation was so persis

tent and intense that it serves as a landmark example of how to hold the

media accountable.

The producers of the program had deliberately used incendiary de

vices to explode the controversial side-mounted gasoline tank on GM

pickup trucks manufactured between 1973 and 1987. Inaccuracies in

the story were pointed out by GM in a letter to the show’s producer, but

no action had been taken. GM’s good fortune in learning about the de

ception and in uncovering evidence allowed its general counsel, Harold

J. Pearce, to convene a news conference in Detroit to hold NBC publicly

accountable for its disreputable behavior. The repercussions were suffi

ciently severe to stop the practice of falsely staged events (see the full

story in the Appendix).

HOLDING THE MEDIA ACCOUNTABLE AND SUING I 177

ACQUIRE MEDIA OWNERSHIP AND BOARD MEMBERSHIP

The ultimate way for corporations to hold the media accountable is to

own them. Control over a wide range of media is made easier when

178 I CHAPTER 7

Box 7.2 Northwest Airlines Versus WCCO-TV

Northwest Airlines charged that WCCO-TV of Minneapolis distorted its

investigative reporting of alleged safety and maintenance problems. In

its three-part series in spring 1996, the station revealed new informa

tion on $7,825,000 in fines the Federal Aviation Administration had

levied against Northwest for maintenance problems. Among the alle

gations made by anchor Don Shelby was that Northwest “violated na

tional safety standards and endangered the lives of passengers.” He

also suggested that the airline pressured mechanics to skimp on

maintenance to maintain its on-time record.

Northwest Airlines accused Shelby of relying on questionable sources

and failing to put the airline’s safety record in context with the records of

other airlines. It also found fault with WCCO’s promo, which showed a

Northwest 747 flying across the screen and appearing to crash.

The council met on October 18, 1996, to deliberate three questions:

(a) Did WCCO-TV paint a distorted, untruthful picture of Northwest Air-

lines? (b) Should promotional announcements for news be held to the

samestandardsasnews?(c)Ifyes,didWCCO-TV’spromotionspainta

distorted, untruthful picture of Northwest Airlines? Each side was al-

lowed a maximum of 10 minutes to make its case on each of the ques-

tions. Then the 24 council members engaged in a Q&A session lasting

no more than 40 minutes. The session was open to the public, but total

seating was limited to 150, including the news media.

The Council voted in favor of Northwest Airlines on all three ques-

tions: 19 to 2, with 1 abstention, on the first question; 14 to 5, with 2

abstentions, on the second question; and 18 to 1, with 3 abstentions,

on the third question. As stated by University of Minnesota journalism

professor Bill Babcock, director of the Silha Center for the Study of

Media Ethics & Law, the Minnesota News Council was saying, “We

have a new era here. We are not dealing with the standards of the in

dustry. We are dealing with public standards, which no longer tolerate

this kind of work.”

Despite the rebuff to WCCO-TV and its presumed embarrassment,

the following evening the station won an Emmy award for this investi

gative series. Editorial writer D. J. Tice of the St. Paul Pioneer Press

notes that “the sensational expose, regardless of how inadequately the

evidence offered supports the accusations made, remains a highly es

teemed style in television news.”

ownership is concentrated in media giants that have been emerging

through a dizzying procession of mergers and purchases. When the

purchasers are in nonmedia industries, grave dangers are added to own

ership control. Business values may intrude into, and conflict with, the

values of journalism. When controlling companies are themselves the

subject of news, they may pressure their news organizations—bluntly

or gently—to interfere with newsgathering and reporting. Another way

for a corporation to exert top-level influence over news policies is

through membership on a newspaper’s or network’s board of directors.

Concentration of Ownership

Concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few conglomerates

may sound appealing from the viewpoint of gaining greater control

over the media, but it is dangerous to business because the media are

more likely to control them. Six media conglomerates—AOL Time

Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corp, Vivendi, and Bertelsmann—con

trol, to a significant degree, what the American people see, hear, and

read. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would like to see

further consolidation, as discussed in chapter 13. It argues that alterna-

tive media, such as the Internet, cable TV, and direct broadcast satellites

have made existing limits on ownership less essential. However, even

the FCC’s own survey in September 2002 reported that people relied pri-

marily on TV for their news and information, 23% on newspapers, 10%

on radio, 7% on cable, and even less on the Internet. The danger of fur-

ther consolidation is that it would lead to less access to diverse channels

of communication by business as well as various interest groups.

would also lead to an increase in advertising rates for business and

higher cable and satellite prices for consumers.

Recent Consolidation. Two recent purchases indicate the pace and

impact of consolidation. In March 2000 the Tribune Company an

nounced it would acquire Times-Mirror, adding the Los Angeles Times,

Newsday on Long Island, and the Sun in Baltimore. The Tribune Com

pany would leap from regional to national status and “control enor

mous content and be in everything from newsprint to magazines to

broadcasting and the Net,” said BusinessWeek.

The new statistic was

that less than 20% of U.S. dailies, only 264 papers, would be independ

ent. With the sale, the 118-year ownership of the Los Angeles Times by

the influential Chandler family ended. Although family owners care

about making profits, they are not “the corporate behemoths obedient

to the quarterly whip of Wall Street.”

It was The New York Times and the

Washington Post, both family newspapers, that had the courage to pub

lish the Pentagon Papers. As the late Katharine Graham, former chair

man of the executive committee of the Washington Post Company,

stated, “family ownership provides the independence that is sometimes

HOLDING THE MEDIA ACCOUNTABLE AND SUING I 179

required to withstand governmental pressure and preserve freedom of

the Press.”

The biggest acquisition was America Online’s purchase of Time

Warner in 2000 for $183 billion.

The world’s biggest online company

and the world’s biggest media company were joined. Competitors and

others expressed fear that the combined company would dominate con

tent and delivery because AOL was the dominant online service and

Time Warner the number two cable operator. Time Warner owns four of

the most popular cable channels: CNN, TBS, TNT, and the Cartoon Net

work, as well as HBO, the leading premium cable network.

The Federal

Trade Commission approved the merger, but took the rare step of ap

pointing a “monitor trustee” to oversee the company for 5 years.

writing about media concentration, Larry Grossman had earlier offered

up Time Warner as an example of a corporation that owns major na

tional magazines, is the second biggest operator of cable television sys

tems, holds all or part of the most important cable program networks

(including HBO and CNN), and owns a leading movie and television pro-

duction company, several of the largest book-publishing companies,

and the biggest recording companies.

Implications of Media Concentration. Larry Grossman was one of

the early writers warning about the implications of media concentra-

tion. The danger he saw was that “the inordinate power of a rich and

privileged few … can dominate the debate, influence the views of the

many, and manipulate public opinion.”

From the perspective of strate-

gic corporate media relations, this situation might have the positive

benefit of reining in the power of the so-called liberal press and estab-

lishing newsroom awareness of certain limits. The danger, however, is

that if the ideas of a particular industry or company are not deemed

newsworthy by the conglomerates, or if they oppose them, they simply

wouldn’t appear. Furthermore, if the conglomerates are critical of some

views, they could launch an attack against them. Disappointed in how

the national media treated them, some companies in the past (e.g.,

Alcoa) have been able to send their news releases through local media.

However, when the local media are also controlled by the conglomer

ates, that option vanishes.

Grossman worries about the impact on society, viewing “the shrink

ing oligopoly of powerful corporate interests” as a danger to democratic

pluralism.

So do others. BusinessWeek warns, “One of the central pil

lars of America’s democracy and market economy is an independent

media with multiple voices.”

The editors of The New York Times asked

the FCC to take a “holistic approach to deregulation” and “to protect the

public interest by managing deregulation in a way that preserves a di

versity of news, opinion and entertainment.”

Another danger exists in the cross-industry ownership by conglom

erates, as illustrated by anecdotal evidence that Time Warner in 1990

canceled publication of a book called Connections: American Business and

180 I CHAPTER 7

the Mob by one of its book subsidiaries, Little, Brown. The publisher was

already in its final round of prerelease publicity for this exposé that

linked some U.S. corporations to organized crime. One of the companies

named was Time. This reference, some believe, was the probable cause

for the book’s late rejection.

General Electric’s Ownership of NBC. When industrial corpora

tions extend their ownership empire to include media enterprises, the

specter of corporate editorial interference with news operations is

raised. After General Electric’s (GE’s) December 1995 deal to acquire RCA

and, thereby, NBC, an editorial/opinion column in The Arizona Republic

raised the question: “What happens if General Electric commits fraud on

the Pentagon and NBC has to report it?” Morton Mintz claims that in

1989 “officials of NBC News deleted three sentences critical of GE from a

segment of a five-part Today show series on the use of bogus and sub

standard materials in American industry.”

An article in the Humanist also suggests that the pattern of owner-

ship affects how news and commentary are manufactured. The refer-

ence was not only to GE but also to major stockholders of other broad-

cast networks, such as Chase Manhattan, J. P. Morgan, and Citibank,

and to Merrill Lynch as the prime stockholder of the Associated Press.

One illustration of possible corporate influence, says the article, is that

the concerns of labor are regularly downplayed. A study analyzing all

reports dealing with workers’ issues—including child care and mini-

mum wage—carried by the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news broad-

casts during 1989 found that coverage amounted to only 2.3% of the

total coverage.

Although no solid evidence exists that GE interferes with the news,

several sources insist GE’s bottom-line mentality permeates every

cranny of NBC News. Grossman charges that GE’s internal environ

ment emphasizes profits over public service or community responsibil

ity. He recalls that in one of GE Chairman Jack Welch’s first meetings

with NBC News, he asked why authors, book publishers, and movie

companies are not charged for the interviews and feature time they re

ceive on the Today show.

Most vociferous in his denunciation of the

profit-making motive, Andrew Jay Schwartzman, executive director of

the Media Access Project, said, “They don’t think about the impact of the

little cheap, sleazy incremental budget cutting they do.”

Disney’s Ownership of ABC. “What’s happening to the world as

we know it?” asked Bob Harper, Fox marketing president, when he was

told by Walt Disney’s ABC television network that it would not broad

cast ads for Fox’s holiday animated film Anastasia or any other ani

mated movie during a 7 p.m. Sunday slot that featured a revival of the

Wonderful World of Disney franchise.

This incident shows network

ownership can get in the way of the kind of advertising it will carry.

ABC’s advertising sales representatives blamed higher-ups at Disney for

HOLDING THE MEDIA ACCOUNTABLE AND SUING I 181