PAN DISCUSSION GROUP 

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PAN Discussion Group Wednesday September 28th 2005
Subject: The Fight for the Media, PBS and NPR

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Location:  RSVP 

http://www.globalissues.org/HumanRights/Media/Corporations/Owners.asp

Media Conglomerates, Mega Mergers, Concentration of Ownership

Global conglomerates can at times have a progressive impact on culture, especially when they enter nations that had been tightly controlled by corrupt crony media systems (as in much of Latin America) or nations that had significant state censorship over media (as in parts of Asia). The global commercial-media system is radical in that it will respect no tradition or custom, on balance, if it stands in the way of profits. But ultimately it is politically conservative, because the media giants are significant beneficiaries of the current social structure around the world, and any upheaval in property or social relations--particularly to the extent that it reduces the power of business--is not in their interest.

The 1980s and 90s saw a lot of mergers and buyouts of media and entertainment companies.

When originally writing this article, we had some nine corporations5 (mainly US) dominating the media world: AOL-Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, Viacom, News Corporation, TCI, General Electric (owner of NBC), Sony (owner of Columbia and TriStar Pictures and major recording interests), and Seagram (owner of Universal film and music interests). As Robert McChesney, a media critic, and author of Rich Media Poor Democracy, (University of Illinois Press, 1999) says, these are the "first tier" companies and following them are around 50 or so "second tier" companies doing media-related business at either national or regional level. All of these companies each do more than one billion dollars worth of business. (The previous link provides more information on the various firms, if you are interested.)

In 1983, fifty corporations dominated most of every mass medium and the biggest media merger in history was a $340 million deal. ... [I]n 1987, the fifty companies had shrunk to twenty-nine. ... [I]n 1990, the twenty-nine had shrunk to twenty three. ... [I]n 1997, the biggest firms numbered ten and involved the $19 billion Disney-ABC deal, at the time the biggest media merger ever. ... [In 2000] AOL Time Warner's $350 billion merged corporation [was] more than 1,000 times larger [than the biggest deal of 1983].

When Viacom offered to buy out6 CBS earlier in 1999 for around $37 billion, it resulted a flurry of praises in the mainstream media in the US, which otherwise reports little on its own industry. However, as the previous link points out, there are increasingly "fewer and fewer players" in the media. This results in the possibility of less diversity and reduced quality of journalism7 as political interests may not allow certain topics to be covered.

Just as the Viacom/CBS deal fervor began to die down, we saw the largest corporate merger in history (valued at over $165 billion) between mega internet giant AOL, and media king Time-Warner, merging to form AOL Time Warner. While corporate-owned mainstream media praised this, there were many critics8 commenting on the resulting lack of diversity that will impact meaningful democracy and open debate even more. (The previous link contains further links to many articles worth checking out that analyze and criticize the merger.)

That was in early 2000. Around early 2002, according to an article from The Nation magazine, the top ten media companies were now AOL Time Warner, Disney, General Electric, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, Sony, Bertelsmann, AT&T and Liberty Media (see previous link). As the article's author, Mark Crispin Miller points out, while different companies may "come and go" out of the top brass, the "overall Leviathan gets bigger and bigger9".

Not all media merger attempts are successful. In February Comcast's $66 billion bid for Disney failed. But the fact this was attempted and would lead to more concentration if successful raised issues about concentration in media.

And as the following (cited at length) notes, the media concentration is a global issue:

It is not a matter for the United States only.

For example, in addition to its more than 11.5 million direct broadcast satellite (DBS) subscribers, Murdoch manages the assets of Hughes Electronics, DirecTV's parent company, which gave News Corp. increased clout over programming in Latin America.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp/FOX merger with DirecTv in December 2003 was opposed by many, to no avail.

Murdoch's empire includes British Sky Broadcasting and START TV in Asia, too.

America's first broadcast network, NBC, owns and operates more than 14 stations, along with CNBC, a business-news network, and Telemundo, the nation's second-largest Spanish-language broadcaster. NBC has recently acquired Bravo, the Arts and Film cable network.

Viacom owns theatres in Canada (Famous Players) and other places -- United Cinemas International, in partnership with Vivendi, for example.

CNN International can be seen in 212 countries, with a daily audience of 1 billion globally.

At first thought, one might ask, what is wrong with a few companies becoming so big? Isn't that how business works? Focusing on democracy-enhancing principles and the institutions needed for it such as the media and journalism, the concern that arises is that there are very few media owners in the mainstream that reach out to the masses. As a result, there is the risk of reduced diversity of issues and perspectives and of political influence and interests from a few affecting the many.Most citizens get their views and understandings of the world around them from the mainstream media. It is therefore critical to understand some of these underlying issues.

Vertical Integration

Many of the large media company owners are entertainment companies and have vertical integration (i.e. own operations and businesses) across various industries and verticals, such as distribution networks, toys and clothing manufacture and/or retailing etc. That means that while this is good for their business, the diversity of opinions and issues we can see being discussed by them will be less well covered. (One cannot expect Disney, for example, to talk too much about sweatshop labor when it is accused of being involved in such things itself.)

Vertical Integration was once looked upon with alarm by government. It was understood that corporations which have control of a total process, from raw material to fabrication to sales, also have few motives for genuine innovation and the power to seize out anyone else who tries to compete. This situation distorts the economy with monopolistic control over prices. Today, government has become sympathetic to dominant vertical corporations that have merged into ever larger total systems. These corporations, including those in the media, have remained largely unrestrained.

Vertical integration is also a part of a business strategy that serves to enhance market power, by allowing cross-promotion and cross-selling. Robert McChesney highlights this well:

[T]he pressure to become a conglomerate is also due to something perhaps even more profound than the need for vertical integration. It was and is stimulated by the desire to increase market power by cross-promoting and cross-selling media properties or "brands" across numerous, different sectors of the media that are not linked in the manner suggested by vertical integration. ... "When you make a movie for an average cost of $10 millon and then cross promote and sell it off of magazines, books, products, television shows out of your own company," Viacom's Redstone said, "the profit potential is enormous."

McChesney then continues to also point out an example where the film, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, based on the MTV cartoon series, cost $11 million but generated a profit of $70 million dollars. Such enormous profits are common place, and hence, the lure that vertical integration and increasing market power is obviously great. Especially considering that the above-mentioned film is at a lower end of potential profits, when compared to say Disney's Lion King that generated over $1 billion in profit:

Disney, more than any media giant is the master at figuring out "new synergistic ways to acquire, slice, dice and merchandise content." Its 1994 animated film The Lion King generated over $1 billion in profit. It led to a lucrative Broadway show, a TV series and all sorts of media spin-offs. It also led to 186 items of merchandising. Wall Street analysts gush at the profit potential of animated films in the hands of media conglomerates; they estimate that such films on average generate four times more profit than their domestic box-office take.

(It is interesting to note how a film goes beyond box office take, but goes towards larger market share and profit through all the cross-selling. That is, a film may generate certain revenue, but the overall profit will be even more than the revenue! From a business strategy, this seems like an amazing way to make "something out of nothing"! While the medieval alchemist was unsuccessful in converting lead to gold, the modern alchemist -- the mega corporation -- can almost do just that!)

On such television channels or newspapers/magazines owned by such large corporations, you are understandably not going to read much criticism about those companies. Furthermore, you are not likely to see much deep criticism about economic, political or other policies that go against the interest of that parent company. So, while it is understandable why a company would aim for such cross selling and integration, the threat to diversity and real competition is real. For smaller companies (who might still have multi million dollars backing) without such an arsenal of distribution and cross-selling possibilities, the competition is very difficult, and they face either going out of business, or being bought out, or if lucky, the dictum of "if you can't beat them, join them" (or try to emulate them!) rings true. On the one hand, Wall Street would approve of further mergers and buyouts and vertical integration, while on the other hand, diversity and real competition would be negated.

Interlocking Directorates

Interlocking directorates is also another issue. Interlocking is where a director of one company may sit on a board of another company. As pointed out by U.S. media watchdog, Fairness an Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) for example, Media corporations share members of the board of directors with a variety of other large corporations11, including banks, investment companies, oil companies, health care and pharmaceutical companies and technology companies.

Ben H Bagdikian, in his book, The Media Monopoly, details some of the impacts of this interlocking. In these cases where directors from numerous large corporations sit on each others boards and own or sit on boards of large media companies, he points out that conflicts of interest can be numerous. Furthermore, he also points out that it is difficult to show beyond doubt that these conflicts of interest make their way into media decisions:

It is not often the public hears of ... clear destruction of editorial independence. In most cases there is no visible imposition of the parent firm's policies, and the policies are often not absolute, conditioned as they are by the desire for profits. ... The problem is ... subtle and profound. In a democracy ... a wide spectrum of ideas has equitable access to the marketplace [justifying a private publisher's imposing his personal politics on the decision of what to print]. The effect of a corporate line [exerting control over public ideas] is not so different from that of a party line [of a country imposing controls]. ... Detecting how most of the mass media impose political tests on what the public will see and hear is not as straightforward as [it may] seem. Political intervention in its most pervasive form is not open and explicit but is concealed under seemingly apolitical reasons [such as the natural choices that have to be made on the countless number of works that might not be published for legitimate non-political based reasons]. ... Most difficult of all to document is the implicit influence of corporate chiefs. Most bosses do not have to tell their subordinates what they like and dislike. (Emphasis added)

...

The deeper social loss of giantism in the media is not in its unfair advantage in profits and power; this is real and it is serious. But the gravest loss is in the self-serving censorship of political and social ideas, in news, magazine articles, books, broadcasting, and movies. Some intervention by owners is direct and blunt. But most of the screening is subtle, some not even occurring at a conscious level, as when subordinates learn by habit to conform to owners' ideas. But subtle or not, the ultimate result is distorted reality and impoverished ideas.

He continues to further point out that the concentrated ownership also allows criticism to be managed as well:

Corporations have multimillion-dollar budgets to dissect and attack news reports they dislike. But with each passing year they have yet another power: They are not only hostile to independent journalists. They are their employers.

In this respect, as the mainstream media is more corporate owned, the same market pressures that affect those companies, affect the media as well and hence, the media itself is largely driven by the forces of the market.In the US, for example, it is very noticeable how competitive the media companies are between themselves. While competition can be a healthy aspect of news reporting and media in general, pushing for better quality, the oligopoly and concentrated control of media companies has meant that the competition has reduced itself to attracting viewers through sensationalism etc rather than quality, detailed reporting etc.

Many stations report news on the very same stories at the exact same time and have commercial breaks at the same time! The sensationalism they compete for is what they hope will drive audiences to their channel.

This type of competition affects the ability to provide quality news and affects the depth and even reputation of professional journalism.

Media executives speak in the language of war - of bombarding audiences, targeting markets, capturing grosses, killing the competition, and winning, by which they mean making more money than the other guy. Some news organisations even refer to their employees as "the troops". It is hard for media workers, including journalists, to operate outside the ethos of hyper-competitition and ratings mania. As willing or unwilling conscripts in the media war, journalists imbibe its values and become warriors themselves.

Disney

As an example of influence, Disney's size and popularity provides a good example. Disney is well regarded for providing wholesome family entertainment, with numerous films, cartoons/animation movies and so on. However, with the increasing size, owning the ABC news station, and enormous vertical integration, there have been increasing criticisms of Disney as well, ranging from the subtle cultural and even racial, gender and class bias depicted in their cartoons and movies, to their ability to naturally (directly or indirectly) influence major news stories via their ABC ownership.

That is not to say that Disney is necessarily sexist, racist and so on by intent. It is possible that the drive for profits is more important and leads to less criticism, because from a business perspective, they have been very successful and implemented the most "appropriate" strategies to expand and grow. As Michael Eisner, CEO of Walt Disney Co. said in an internal memo:We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.

Concentration of ownership is where the problem largely lies

Defenders of narrowing control of the media point, accurately enough, to the large numbers of media outlets available to the population: almost 1,700 daily papers, more than 8,000 weeklies, 10,000 radio and television stations, 11,000 magazines, 2,500 book publishers ... and more ... Unfortunately, the large numbers deepen the problem of excessively concentrated control. If the number of outlets is growing and the number of owners declining, then each owner controls even more formidable communications power.

It isn't necessarily the corporate ownership that is problematic. For example, in U.K. the Independent Television Network (ITN), and Channel 4 are highly regarded for their quality documentaries and ITN's evening news program was said to challenge the BBC's news programming for quality (until ITN seemed to succumb to pressure to use that prime time for movies instead of news). More problematic is when the ownership of media (and therefore of major avenues of opinions and views etc) becomes concentrated, as pointed out by Ben Bagdikian here:

The threat does not lie in the commercial operation of the mass media. It is the best method there is and, with all its faults, it is not inherently bad. But narrow control, whether by government or corporations, is inherently bad. In the end, no small group, certainly no group with as much uniformity of outlook and as concentrated in power as the current media corporations, can be sufficiently open and flexible to reflect the full richness and variety of society's values and needs. ... The answer is not elimination of private enterprise in the media, but the opposite. It is the restoration of genuine competition and diversity.

This concentrated power, Ben also points out, "is so concentrated, ubiquitous, and artful, that to a degree unmatched in former mixtures of entertainment, it dilutes influences from family, schooling, and other sources that are grounded in real-life experience, weakening, their ability to guide growing generations."

In some respects, even large media companies can be potentially beneficial. For example, with size comes that political power, and ability to provide appropriate scrutiny on wrong-doings of local businesses etc, as pointed out by Dan Kennedy:

[T]here is at least an argument to be made that only big media have the power and influence to cover the large institutions that dominate modern life. In January 2000, Jack Shafer wrote a piece for the online magazine Slate (owned by the extremely big Microsoft Corporation and thus part of a media alliance that includes NBC, MSNBC, General Electric, the Washington Post, and Newsweek) arguing exactly that.

"Small, independently owned papers routinely pull punches when covering local car dealers, real estate, and industry," Shafer wrote, asserting a nasty little truth known by every reporter and editor who has ever worked for a locally owned community newspaper. "Whatever its shortcomings - and they are many - only big media possesses the means to consistently hold big business and big government accountable."

But when big media is owned by big business, there is less criticism of big business or related political issues in big government.

Political bias can also creep in too. Media watchdog, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) did a study of ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News22 in 2001 in which they found that "92 percent of all U.S. sources interviewed were white, 85 percent were male and, where party affiliation was identifiable, 75 percent were Republican." While of course this is not a complete study of the mainstream media, it does show that there can be heavy political biases on even the most popular mainstream media outlets.

A year-long study by FAIR, of CNN's media show, Reliable Sources showed a large bias in sources used, and as their article is titled, CNN's show had reliably narrow sources23. They pointed out for example, "Covering one year of weekly programs [December 1, 2001 to November 30, 2002] with 203 guests, the FAIR study found Reliable Sources' guestlist strongly favored mainstream media insiders and right-leaning pundits. In addition, female critics were significantly underrepresented, ethnic minority voices were almost non-existent and progressive voices were far outnumbered by their conservative counterparts."

Given that so many of the large media owners are entertainment companies, broadcast journalism and much of print journalism, as well as the book publishing industry, are increasingly criticized for having become appendages to entertainment empires. Furthermore, with various top media/entertainment companies owning shares in each others' enterprises, combined with the interlocking described above, the resulting concentration of ownership, while maybe not a monopoly in the strictest sense, tends towards oligopoly or cartel, and this leads to a common interest amongst such companies in keeping out competing enterprises and even competing ideas. The Nation magazine captures the consequence of this quite well, looking at the situation in the United States:

Of all the [media] cartel's dangerous consequences for American society and culture, the worst is its corrosive influence on journalism. Under AOL Time Warner, GE, Viacom et al., the news is, with a few exceptions, yet another version of the entertainment that the cartel also vends nonstop. This is also nothing new -- consider the newsreels of yesteryear -- but the gigantic scale and thoroughness of the corporate concentration has made a world of difference, and so has made this world a very different place. ... the news divisions of the media cartel appear to work against the public interest -- and for their parent companies (Emphasis is Original)

A U.S. Federal Court ruling on February 19, 2002, lifted barriers to two regulations that attempted to limit the power of media companies. One was that a company can reach no more than 35 percent of the country, and the other was that it cannot own a TV station in an area where they own a cable company. As a result of this decision, the concern here is that it means that those with the most money can buy other stations which will lead to further concentration and consolidation. (See also the Center for Digital Democracy web site for more on this and other such issues.)

The Quest for the Public Airwaves

And now, corporate lobbyists are trying to have even the public airwaves sold to private corporations. While in many countries, national ownership of the airwaves can lead to propaganda avenues, many democratic countries are able to, through their governments, apply some set of standards and regulations on how radio is used to ensure people have access to it while also allowing private corporations a lot of access to it. Large, private, often multinational corporations, however, do not have such accountability. Their only real accountability is to shareholders, whose concerns are returns on investments (profit).

As Jeremy Rifkin asks, "Our PCs, palm pilots, wireless internet, cellular phones, pagers, radios and television all rely on the radio frequencies of the spectrum to send and receive messages, pictures, audio, data, etc ... If the radio frequencies of the planet were owned and controlled by global media corporations, how would the billions who live on earth guarantee their most basic right to communicate with one another?"

The Quest for the Internet?

The Internet is hailed as the new communications medium taking over from television eventually. While there are currently enormous problems and issues of the "digital divide" and while it is still in its infancy, the Internet has proved to allow enormous amounts of information to be exchanged and be made available. It is very easy to get news from half way around the world, and some see the Internet as one of the main new technological advances that will enhance and improve democracy further. Some even describe the Internet as providing a more level playing field for new, smaller and diverse groups and companies.

The potential is very exciting and numerous innovative sites, activities and other forms of organizing and action has been centered around the use of the internet.

However, in terms of the potential for diverse news and information reaching people, as Danny Schechter, executive director of the MediaChannel.org, points out, the Internet, is not very diverse, even though it appears to be30. "The concentration in ownership that is restructuring old media has led to conglomeration in news transmission and a narrowing of sourcing in new media. It is cheaper for Web sites to buy someone else's news than generate their own." Like many others, he points out how major web portals such as AOL look to "lock in" their audience to their site(s) and products so that they can better sell and target their audience (customers).

Furthermore, consolidations and media mergers such as that of AOL and Time Warner, have skewed the "playing field". According to Jupiter Media Metrix, a company that tracks internet and technology analysis and measurement, the "[t]otal number of companies that control 60 percent of all minutes spent online in the US dwindled 87 percent, from 110 in March 1999 to 14 in March 2001" due to successes in advertising and marketing as a key to overcome the barrier to online entry. They further point out that within the 14 companies, it is heavily skewed towards the top four. Also, they suggest that key factors driving media consolidation in this way include:

* Mergers and acquisitions turning "already powerful companies into even more powerful media behemoths".

* Major media companies have been able to invest heavily in "[i]mproved quality of presentation, intensity of marketing and integration with off-line programming"

* Economies of scale, that also apply to online businesses as well as traditional businesses.

As Danny Schechter also points out, most news and information sites don't provide their own news sources, but get them from the likes of Reuters and Associated Press, or, in the case of broadcast companies, their own content together with mixes of such agency content.

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Here's a quick summary of why Public Broadcasting is so wrong

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4002

Top Ten Reasons to Privatize Public Broadcasting

by David Boaz

David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and author of Libertarianism: A Primer

Republicans in Congress are debating whether to make small cuts in the funding for public broadcasting. They're not thinking big enough.

Here are the top ten reasons to cut off the taxpayer dollars flowing to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System.

10. We live in a 500-channel world. Back in 1967, when the Public Broadcasting Act was passed, most Americans only had three television channels - ABC, NBC and CBS. But today we have six over-the-air networks and hundreds of cable channels offering everything from news to soap operas to classic movies to history and opera.

9. Sesame Street isn't so special any more. When anyone suggests cutting the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, its defenders immediately cry "they're trying to kill Sesame Street!" In fact, Sesame Street is big business and would survive in any environment. But also, as Jacob Sullum of Reason notes, "Children's programming that has an audience does not need taxpayer subsidies. Noggin, which is more 'commercial-free' than PBS stations, carries 12 hours of kids' shows (including two different versions of 'Sesame Street') every day, and they are at least as good as the PBS offerings in entertainment and educational value. Parent-acceptable children's programming can also be seen on Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel and ABC Family."

8. Republicans are trying to regulate the way public broadcasting works. A Republican chairman of the CPB, which funds both NPR and the PBS, has appointed a Republican activist as president and CEO. He also commissioned a conservative activist to report to him on PBS's programming.

7. Public broadcasting has a liberal bias. The reason the Republicans are poking around in PBS's business is that they're tired of taxpayer-funded radio and television networks being used to campaign against Republican administrations and their policies. Does public broadcasting have a liberal bias? Is the Pope Catholic? I have the luxury of choosing from two NPR stations. On Wednesday evening, June 29, a Robert Reich commentary came on. I switched to the other station, which was broadcasting a Daniel Schorr commentary. That's not just liberal bias, it's a liberal roadblock.

6. Bias is inevitable. Any reporter or editor has to choose what's important. It's impossible to make such decisions without a framework, a perspective, a view of how the world works. But taxpayers shouldn't have to subsidize any set of biases.

5. You shouldn't use tax money for lobbying. As soon as a congressional subcommittee voted to reduce funding for the CPB, NPR's 800 stations and PBS's 300 stations swung into action. They broadcast 30-second spots urging listeners to call their congressman and "save public broadcasting." Their websites said in bold lettering, "Please call your Senator today to express your support of federal funding for Public Broadcasting" and provided the phone numbers and email addresses. This was a multimillion-dollar ad campaign in a week, paid for with tax dollars. It's just wrong to use our tax dollars to lobby Congress to get more of our tax dollars.

4. Public broadcasting subsidizes the rich. A PBS survey shows that its viewers are 44 percent more likely than the average American to make more than $150,000 a year, 57 percent more likely to own a vacation home, and 177 percent more likely to have investments worth more than $150,000. Why should middle-class taxpayers be subsidizing the news and entertainment of the rich?

3. Public broadcasting gets only 15 percent of its money from the federal government. Businesses and nonprofits deal with 15 percent revenue losses all the time. If NPR and PBS lost all their federal money, they wouldn't disappear. They might eliminate their least popular programs, they might work harder to get local sponsors, or they might have to tighten their belts. But a 15 percent budget cut wouldn't put them out of business.

2. We have a $400 billion deficit. Not to mention total federal liabilities of $72 trillion. It's hard to imagine how we'll ever pay that off. But you start by cutting non-essential spending. Surely, in a 500-channel universe, public broadcasting is non-essential.

And the number one reason to privatize public broadcasting is:

1. The separation of news and state. We wouldn't want the federal government to publish a national newspaper. Why should we have a government television network and a government radio network? If anything should be kept separate from government and politics, it's the news and public affairs programming that Americans watch. When government brings us the news-with all the inevitable bias and spin-the government is putting its thumb on the scales of democracy. It's time for that to stop.

This article originally appeared on FoxNews.com on July 25, 2005

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And of course we have to have a piece from Mr PBS himself Bill Moyers:

http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/0516-34.htm

Take Public Broadcasting Back

by Bill Moyers

Closing address National Conference on Media Reform

St. Louis, MissouriMay 15, 2005

Pat Aufderheide got it right, I think, in the recent issue of In These Times when she wrote: "This is a moment when public media outlets can make a powerful case for themselves. Public radio, public TV, cable access, public DBS channels, media arts centers, youth media projects, nonprofit Internet news services . . . low-power radio and webcasting are all part of a nearly-invisible feature of today's media map: the public media sector. They exist not to make a profit, not to push an ideology, not to serve customers, but to create a public-a group of people who can talk productively with those who don't share their views, and defend the interests of the people who have to live with the consequences of corporate and governmental power."

She gives examples of the possibilities. "Look at what happened," she said, "when thousands of people who watched Stanley Nelson's 'The Murder of Emmett Till' on their public television channels joined a postcard campaign that re-opened the murder case after more than half a century. Look at NPR's courageous coverage of the Iraq war, an expensive endeavor that wins no points from this Administration. Look at Chicago Access Network's Community Forum, where nonprofits throughout the region can showcase their issues and find volunteers."

For all our flaws, Pat argues that the public media are a very important resource in a noisy and polluted information environment.

You can also take wings reading Jason Miller's May 4th article on Z Net about the mainstream media. While it is true that much of it is corrupted by the influence of government and corporate interests, Miller writes, there are still men and women in the mainstream who practice a high degree of journalistic integrity and who do challenge us with their stories and analysis. But the real hope 'lies within the internet with its two billion or more web sites providing a wealth of information drawn from almost unlimited resources that span the globe. . . If knowledge is power, one's capacity to increase that power increases exponentially through navigation of the Internet for news and information."

Surely this is one issue that unites us as we leave here today. The fight to preserve the web from corporate gatekeepers joins media reformers, producers and educators -- and it's a fight that has only just begun.

I want to tell you about another fight we're in today. The story I've come to share with you goes to the core of our belief that the quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined. I can tell this story because I've been living it. It's been in the news this week, including reports of more attacks on a single journalist -- yours truly -- by the right-wing media and their allies at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

As some of you know, CPB was established almost forty years ago to set broad policy for public broadcasting and to be a firewall between political influence and program content. What some on this board are now doing today, led by its chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, is too important, too disturbing and yes, even too dangerous for a gathering like this not to address.

We're seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age old ambition of power and ideology to squelch and punish journalists who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable.

Let me assure you that I take in stride attacks by the radical right-wingers who have not given up demonizing me although I retired over six months ago. They've been after me for years now and I suspect they will be stomping on my grave to make sure I don't come back from the dead. I should remind them, however, that one of our boys pulled it off some two thousand years ago -- after the Pharisees, Sadducees and Caesar's surrogates thought they had shut him up for good. Of course I won't be expecting that kind of miracle, but I should put my detractors on notice: They might just compel me out of the rocking chair and back into the anchor chair.

Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control, using the government to threaten and intimidate. I mean the people who are hollowing out middle class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class in a war to make sure Ahmed Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq's oil. I mean the people who turn faith based initiatives into a slush fund and who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets. I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy.

That's who I mean. And if that's editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it's okay to state the conclusion you're led to by the evidence.

One reason I'm in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn't play by the conventional rules of beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

Jonathan Mermin quotes David Ignatius of the Washington Post on why the deep interests of the American public are so poorly served by beltway journalism. The "rules of our game," says Ignatius, "make it hard for us to tee up an issue...without a news peg." He offers a case in point: the debacle of America's occupation of Iraq. "If Senator so and so hasn't criticized post-war planning for Iraq," says Ignatius, "then it's hard for a reporter to write a story about that."

Mermin also quotes public television's Jim Lehrer acknowledging that unless an official says something is so, it isn't news. Why were journalists not discussing the occupation of Iraq? Because, says Lehrer, "the word occupation...was never mentioned in the run-up to the war." Washington talked about the invasion as "a war of liberation, not a war of occupation, so as a consequence, "those of us in journalism never even looked at the issue of occupation."

"In other words," says Jonathan Mermin, "if the government isn't talking about it, we don't report it." He concludes, "[Lehrer's] somewhat jarring declaration, one of many recent admissions by journalists that their reporting failed to prepare the public for the calamitous occupation that has followed the 'liberation' of Iraq, reveals just how far the actual practice of American journalism has deviated from the First Amendment ideal of a press that is independent of the government."

Take the example (also cited by Mermin) of Charles J. Hanley. Hanley is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Associated Press, whose fall 2003 story on the torture of Iraqis in American prisons -- before a U.S. Army report and photographs documenting the abuse surfaced -- was ignored by major American newspapers. Hanley attributes this lack of interest to the fact that "It was not an officially sanctioned story that begins with a handout from an official source." Furthermore, Iraqis recounting their own personal experience of Abu Ghraib simply did not have the credibility with beltway journalists of American officials denying that such things happened. Judith Miller of The New York Times, among others, relied on the credibility of official but unnamed sources when she served essentially as the government stenographer for claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

These "rules of the game" permit Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too often simply to recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers, sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading.

I decided long ago that this wasn't healthy for democracy. I came to see that "news is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity." In my documentaries - whether on the Watergate scandals thirty years ago or the Iran Contra conspiracy twenty years ago or Bill Clinton's fund raising scandals ten years ago or, five years ago, the chemical industry's long and despicable cover up of its cynical and unspeakable withholding of critical data about its toxic products from its workers, I realized that investigative journalism could not be a collaboration between the journalist and the subject. Objectivity is not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference.

I came to believe that objective journalism means describing the object being reported on, including the little fibs and fantasies as well as the Big Lie of the people in power. In no way does this permit journalists to make accusations and allegations. It means, instead, making sure that your reporting and your conclusions can be nailed to the post with confirming evidence.

This is always hard to do, but it has never been harder than today. Without a trace of irony, the powers-that-be have appropriated the newspeak vernacular of George Orwell's "1984." They give us a program vowing "No Child Left Behind" while cutting funds for educating disadvantaged kids. They give us legislation cheerily calling for "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests" that give us neither. And that's just for starters.

In Orwell's "1984", the character Syme, one of the writers of that totalitarian society's dictionary, explains to the protagonist Winston, "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?" "Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now? The whole climate of thought," he said, "will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only on partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, to ask questions and be skeptical. That kind of orthodoxy can kill a democracy - or worse.

I learned about this the hard way. I grew up in the South where the truth about slavery, race, and segregation had been driven from the pulpits, driven from the classrooms and driven from the newsrooms. It took a bloody Civil War to bring the truth home and then it took another hundred years for the truth to make us free.

Then I served in the Johnson administration. Imbued with cold war orthodoxy and confident that "might makes right," we circled the wagons, listened only to each other, and pursued policies the evidence couldn't carry. The results were devastating for Vietnamese and Americans.

I brought all of this to the task when PBS asked me after 9/11 to start a new weekly broadcast. They wanted us to make it different from anything else on the air --commercial or public broadcasting. They asked us to tell stories no one else was reporting and to offer a venue to people who might not otherwise be heard. That wasn't a hard sell. I had been deeply impressed by studies published in leading peer-reviewed scholarly journals by a team of researchers led by Vassar College sociologist William Hoynes. Extensive research on the content of public television over a decade found that political discussions on our public affairs programs generally included a limited set of voices that offer a narrow range of perspectives on current issues and events. Instead of far-ranging discussions and debates, the kind that might engage viewers as citizens, not simply as audiences, this research found that public affairs programs on PBS stations were populated by the standard set of elite news sources. Whether government officials and Washington journalists (talking about political strategy) or corporate sources (talking about stock prices or the economy from the investor's viewpoint), Public television, unfortunately, all too often was offering the same kind of discussions, and a similar brand of insider discourse, that is featured regularly on commercial television.

Who didn't appear was also revealing. Hoynes and his team found that in contrast to the conservative mantra that public television routinely featured the voices of anti-establishment critics, "alternative perspectives were rare on public television and were effectively drowned out by the stream of government and corporate views that represented the vast majority of sources on our broadcasts." The so-called 'experts' who got most of the face time came primarily from mainstream news organizations and Washington think tanks rather than diverse interests. Economic news, for example, was almost entirely refracted through the views of business people, investors and business journalists. Voices outside the corporate/Wall Street universe -- nonprofessional workers, labor representatives, consumer advocates and the general public were rarely heard. In sum, these two studies concluded, the economic coverage was so narrow that the views and the activities of most citizens became irrelevant.

All this went against the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 that created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I know. I was there. As a young policy assistant to President Johnson, I attended my first meeting to discuss the future of public broadcasting in 1964 in the office of the Commissioner of Education. I know firsthand that the Public Broadcasting Act was meant to provide an alternative to commercial television and to reflect the diversity of the American people.

This, too, was on my mind when we assembled the team for NOW. It was just after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. We agreed on two priorities. First, we wanted to do our part to keep the conversation of democracy going. That meant talking to a wide range of people across the spectrum -- left, right and center. It meant poets, philosophers, politicians, scientists, sages and scribblers. We threw the conversation of democracy open to all comers. Most of those who came responded the same way that Ron Paul, Republican and Libertarian congressman from Texas did when he wrote me after his appearance, "I have received hundreds of positive e-mails from your viewers. I appreciate the format of your program which allows time for a full discussion of ideas... I'm tired of political shows featuring two guests shouting over each other and offering the same arguments... NOW was truly refreshing."

Hold your applause because that's not the point of the story.

We had a second priority. We intended to do strong, honest and accurate reporting, telling stories we knew people in high places wouldn't like.

I told our producers and correspondents that in our field reporting our job was to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth. This was all the more imperative in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. America could be entering a long war against an elusive and stateless enemy with no definable measure of victory and no limit to its duration, cost or foreboding fear. The rise of a homeland security state meant government could justify extraordinary measures in exchange for protecting citizens against unnamed, even unproven, threats.

Furthermore, increased spending during a national emergency can produce a spectacle of corruption behind a smokescreen of secrecy. I reminded our team of the words of the news photographer in Tom Stoppard's play who said, "People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse when everyone is kept in the dark."

I also reminded them of how the correspondent and historian, Richard Reeves, answered a student who asked him to define real news. "Real news," Reeves responded, "is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms."

For these reasons and in that spirit we went about reporting on Washington as no one else in broadcasting -- except occasionally "60 Minutes" -- was doing. We reported on the expansion of the Justice Department's power of surveillance. We reported on the escalating Pentagon budget and expensive weapons that didn't work. We reported on how campaign contributions influenced legislation and policy to skew resources to the comfortable and well-connected while our troops were fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq with inadequate training and armor. We reported on how the Bush administration was shredding the Freedom of Information Act. We went around the country to report on how closed door, back room deals in Washington were costing ordinary workers and tax payers their livelihood and security. We reported on offshore tax havens that enable wealthy and powerful Americans to avoid their fair share of national security and the social contract.

And always -- because what people know depends on who owns the press -- we kept coming back to the media business itself -- to how mega media corporations were pushing journalism further and further down the hierarchy of values, how giant radio cartels were silencing critics while shutting communities off from essential information, and how the mega media companies were lobbying the FCC for the right to grow ever more powerful.

The broadcast caught on. Our ratings grew every year. There was even a spell when we were the only public affairs broadcast on PBS whose audience was going up instead of down.

Our journalistic peers took notice. The Los Angeles Times said, "NOW's team of reporters has regularly put the rest of the media to shame, pursuing stories few others bother to touch."

The Philadelphia Inquirer said our segments on the sciences, the arts, politics and the economy were "provocative public television at its best.

The Austin American Statesman called NOW "the perfect antidote to today's high pitched decibel level - a smart, calm, timely news program."

Frazier Moore of the Associated Press said we were "hard-edged when appropriate but never Hardball. Don't expect combat. Civility reigns."

And the Baton Rouge Advocate said "NOW invites viewers to consider the deeper implication of the daily headlines," drawing on "a wide range of viewpoints which transcend the typical labels of the political left or right."

Let me repeat that: NOW draws on "a wide range of viewpoints which transcend the typical labels of the political left or right."

The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 had been prophetic. Open public television to the American people -- offer diverse interests, ideas and voices ... be fearless in your belief in democracy -- and they will come.

Hold your applause - that's not the point of the story.

The point of the story is something only a handful of our team, including my wife and partner Judith Davidson Moyers, and I knew at the time -- that the success of NOW's journalism was creating a backlash in Washington.

The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican party became. That's because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth.

This is the point of my story: Ideologues don't want you to go beyond the typical labels of left and right. They embrace a world view that can't be proven wrong because they will admit no evidence to the contrary. They want your reporting to validate their belief system and when it doesn't, God forbid. Never mind that their own stars were getting a fair shake on NOW: Gigot, Viguerie, David Keene of the American Conservative Union, Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth, and others. No, our reporting was giving the radical right fits because it wasn't the party line. It wasn't that we were getting it wrong. Only three times in three years did we err factually, and in each case we corrected those errors as soon as we confirmed their inaccuracy. The problem was that we were getting it right, not right-wing -- telling stories that partisans in power didn't want told.

I've always thought the American eagle needed a left wing and a right wing. The right wing would see to it that economic interests had their legitimate concerns addressed. The left wing would see to it that ordinary people were included in the bargain. Both would keep the great bird on course. But with two right wings or two left wings, it's no longer an eagle and it's going to crash.

My occasional commentaries got to them as well. Although apparently he never watched the broadcast (I guess he couldn't take the diversity) Senator Trent Lott came out squealing like a stuck pig when after the mid-term elections in 2002 I described what was likely to happen now that all three branches of government were about to be controlled by one party dominated by the religious, corporate and political right. Instead of congratulating the winners for their election victory as some network broadcasters had done -- or celebrating their victory as Fox, The Washington Times, The Weekly Standard, Talk Radio and other partisan Republican journalists had done -- I provided a little independent analysis of what the victory meant. And I did it the old fashioned way: I looked at the record, took the winners at their word, and drew the logical conclusion that they would use power as they always said they would. And I set forth this conclusion in my usual modest Texas way.

Events since then have confirmed the accuracy of what I said, but, to repeat, being right is exactly what the right doesn't want journalists to be.

Strange things began to happen. Friends in Washington called to say that they had heard of muttered threats that the PBS reauthorization would be held off "unless Moyers is dealt with." The Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, was said to be quite agitated. Apparently there was apoplexy in the right wing aerie when I closed the broadcast one Friday night by putting an American flag in my lapel and said - well, here's exactly what I said.

"I wore my flag tonight. First time. Until now I haven't thought it necessary to display a little metallic icon of patriotism for everyone to see. It was enough to vote, pay my taxes, perform my civic duties, speak my mind, and do my best to raise our kids to be good Americans.

Sometimes I would offer a small prayer of gratitude that I had been born in a country whose institutions sustained me, whose armed forces protected me, and whose ideals inspired me; I offered my heart's affections in return. It no more occurred to me to flaunt the flag on my chest than it did to pin my mother's picture on my lapel to prove her son's love. Mother knew where I stood; so does my country. I even tuck a valentine in my tax returns on April 15.

So what's this doing here? Well, I put it on to take it back. The flag's been hijacked and turned into a logo - the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is the good housekeeping seal of approval. During the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration's patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao's little red book on every official's desk, omnipresent and unread.

But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They're in the same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks even as they call for more spending on war.

So I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks, or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don't have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the coalition of the willing (after they first stash the cash.) I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what Bin Laden did to us. The flag belongs to the country, not to the government. And it reminds me that it's not un-American to think that war - except in self-defense - is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve, and diplomacy. Come to think of it, standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country."

That did it. That - and our continuing reporting on overpricing at Halliburton, chicanery on K-Street, and the heavy, if divinely guided, hand of Tom DeLay.

When Senator Lott protested that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting "has not seemed willing to deal with Bill Moyers," a new member of the board, a Republican fundraiser named Cheryl Halperin, who had been appointed by President Bush, agreed that CPB needed more power to do just that sort of thing. She left no doubt about the kind of penalty she would like to see imposed on malefactors like Moyers.

As rumors circulated about all this, I asked to meet with the CPB board to hear for myself what was being said. I thought it would be helpful for someone like me, who had been present at the creation and part of the system for almost 40 years, to talk about how CPB had been intended to be a heat shield to protect public broadcasters from exactly this kind of intimidation. After all, I'd been there at the time of Richard Nixon's attempted coup. In those days, public television had been really feisty and independent, and often targeted for attacks. A Woody Allen special that poked fun at Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration had actually been cancelled. The White House had been so outraged over a documentary called the "Banks and the Poor" that PBS was driven to adopt new guidelines. That didn't satisfy Nixon, and when public television hired two NBC reporters -- Robert McNeil and Sander Vanocur -- to co-anchor some new broadcasts, it was, for Nixon, the last straw. According to White House memos at the time, he was determined to "get the left wing commentators who are cutting us up off public television at once -- indeed, yesterday if possible."

Sound familiar?

Nixon vetoed the authorization for CPB with a message written in part by his sidekick Pat Buchanan who in a private memo had castigated Vanocur, MacNeil, Washington Week in Review, Black Journal and Bill Moyers as "unbalanced against the administration."

It does sound familiar.

I always knew Nixon would be back. I just didn't know this time he would be the Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Buchanan and Nixon succeeded in cutting CPB funding for all public affairs programming except for Black Journal. They knocked out multiyear funding for the National Public Affairs Center for Television, otherwise known as NPACT. And they voted to take away from the PBS staff the ultimate responsibility for the production of programming.

But in those days - and this is what I wanted to share with Kenneth Tomlinson and his colleagues on the CPB board - there were still Republicans in America who did not march in ideological lockstep and who stood on principle against politicizing public television. The chairman of the public station in Dallas was an industrialist named Ralph Rogers, a Republican but no party hack, who saw the White House intimidation as an assault on freedom of the press and led a nationwide effort to stop it. The chairman of CPB was former Republican congressman Thomas Curtis, who was also a principled man. He resigned, claiming White House interference. Within a few months, the crisis was over. CPB maintained its independence, PBS grew in strength, and Richard Nixon would soon face impeachment and resign for violating the public trust, not just public broadcasting. Paradoxically, the very Public Affairs Center for Television that Nixon had tried to kill - NPACT - put PBS on the map by rebroadcasting in prime time each day's Watergate hearings, drawing huge ratings night after night and establishing PBS as an ally of democracy. We should still be doing that sort of thing.

That was 33 years ago. I thought the current CPB board would like to hear and talk about the importance of standing up to political interference. I was wrong. They wouldn't meet with me. I tried three times. And it was all downhill after that.

I was naïve, I guess. I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House. But that's what Kenneth Tomlinson has done. On Fox News this week he denied that he's carrying out a White House mandate or that he's ever had any conversations with any Bush administration official about PBS. But The New York Times reported that he enlisted Karl Rove to help kill a proposal that would have put on the CPB board people with experience in local radio and television. The Times also reported that "on the recommendation of administration officials" Tomlinson hired a White House flack (I know the genre) named Mary Catherine Andrews as a senior CPB staff member. While she was still reporting to Karl Rove at the White House, Andrews set up CPB's new ombudsman's office and had a hand in hiring the two people who will fill it, one of whom once worked for... you guessed it ... Kenneth Tomlinson.

I would like to give Mr. Tomlinson the benefit of the doubt, but I can't. According to a book written about the Reader's Digest when he was its Editor-in-Chief, he surrounded himself with other right-wingers -- a pattern he's now following at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. There is Ms. Andrews from the White House. For Acting President he hired Ken Ferree from the FCC, who was Michael Powell's enforcer when Powell was deciding how to go about allowing the big media companies to get even bigger. According to a forthcoming book, one of Ferree's jobs was to engage in tactics designed to dismiss any serious objection to media monopolies. And, according to Eric Alterman, Ferree was even more contemptuous than Michael Powell of public participation in the process of determining media ownership. Alterman identifies Ferree as the FCC staffer who decided to issue a 'protective order' designed to keep secret the market research on which the Republican majority on the commission based their vote to permit greater media consolidation.

It's not likely that with guys like this running the CPB some public television producer is going to say, "Hey, let's do something on how big media is affecting democracy."

Call it preventive capitulation.

As everyone knows, Mr. Tomlinson also put up a considerable sum of money, reportedly over five million dollars, for a new weekly broadcast featuring Paul Gigot and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. Gigot is a smart journalist, a sharp editor, and a fine fellow. I had him on NOW several times and even proposed that he become a regular contributor. The conversation of democracy -- remember? All stripes.

But I confess to some puzzlement that the Wall Street Journal, which in the past editorialized to cut PBS off the public tap, is now being subsidized by American taxpayers although its parent company, Dow Jones, had revenues in just the first quarter of this year of 400 million dollars.

I thought public television was supposed to be an alternative to commercial media, not a funder of it.

But in this weird deal, you get a glimpse of the kind of programming Mr. Tomlinson apparently seems to prefer. Alone of the big major newspapers, the Wall Street Journal, has no op-ed page where different opinions can compete with its right- wing editorials. The Journal's PBS broadcast is just as homogenous -right- wingers talking to each other. Why not $5 million to put the editors of The Nation on PBS? Or Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now!" You balance right-wing talk with left-wing talk.

There's more. Only two weeks ago did we learn that Mr. Tomlinson had spent $10,000 last year to hire a contractor who would watch my show and report on political bias. That's right. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson spent $10,000 of your money to hire a guy to watch NOW to find out who my guests were and what my stories were.

Ten thousand dollars.

Gee, Ken, for $2.50 a week, you could pick up a copy of "TV Guide" on the newsstand. A subscription is even cheaper, and I would have sent you a coupon that can save you up to 62 %.

For that matter, Ken, all you had to do was watch the show yourself. You could have made it easier with a double Jim Bean, your favorite. Or you could have gone on line where the listings are posted. Hell, you could have called me -- collect -- and I would have told you what was on the broadcast that night.

Ten thousand dollars. That would have bought five tables at Thursday night's Conservative Salute for Tom DeLay. Better yet, that ten grand would pay for the books in an elementary school classroom or an upgrade of its computer lab.

But having sent that cash, what did he find? Only Mr. Tomlinson knows. He apparently decided not to share the results with his staff or his board or leak it to Robert Novak. The public paid for it - but Ken Tomlinson acts as if he owns it.

In a May 10th op-ed piece, in Reverend Moon's conservative "Washington Times", Mr. Tomlinson maintained he had not released the findings because public broadcasting is such a delicate institution he did not want to "damage public broadcasting's image with controversy." Where I come from in Texas, we shovel that kind of stuff every day.

As we learned only this week, that's not the only news Mr. Tomlinson tried to keep to himself. As reported by Jeff Chester's Center for Digital Democracy of which I am a supporter, there were two public opinion surveys commissioned by CPB but not released to the media - not even to PBS and NPR! According to a source who talked to Salon.com, "the first results were too good and [Tomlinson] didn't believe them. After the Iraq war, the board commissioned another round of polling and they thought they'd get worse results."

But they didn't.

The data revealed that, in reality, public broadcasting has an 80% favorable rating and that "the majority of the U.S. adult population does not believe that the news and information programming on public broadcasting is biased."

In fact, more than half believed PBS provided more in-depth and trustworthy news and information than the networks and 55% said PBS was "fair and balanced."

I repeat: I would like to have given Mr. Tomlinson the benefit of the doubt. But this is the man who was running The Voice of America back in 1984 when a partisan named Charlie Wick was politicizing the United States Information Agency of which Voice of America was a part. It turned out there was a blacklist of people who had been removed from the list of prominent Americans sent abroad to lecture on behalf of America and the USIA. What's more, it was discovered that evidence as to how those people were chosen to be on the blacklist -- more than 700 documents -- had been shredded. Among those on the lists of journalists, writers, scholars and politicians were dangerous left wing subversives like Walter Cronkite, James Baldwin, Gary Hart, Ralph Nader, Ben Bradley, Coretta Scott King and David Brinkley.

The person who took the fall for the black list was another right-winger. He resigned. Shortly thereafter, so did Kenneth Tomlinson, who had been one of the people in the agency with the authority to see the lists of potential speakers and allowed to strike people's names.

Let me be clear about this: there is no record, apparently, of what Ken Tomlinson did. We don't know whether he supported or protested the blacklisting of so many American liberals. Or what he thinks of it now.

But I had hoped Bill O'Reilly would have asked him about it when he appeared on The "O'Reilly Factor" this week. He didn't. Instead, Tomlinson went on attacking me with O'Reilly egging him on, and he went on denying he was carrying out a partisan mandate despite published reports to the contrary. The only time you could be sure he was telling the truth was at the end of the broadcast when he said to O'Reilly, "We love your show."

We love your show.

I wrote Kenneth Tomlinson on Friday and asked him to sit down with me for one hour on PBS and talk about all this. I suggested that he choose the moderator and the guidelines.

There is one other thing in particular I would like to ask him about. In his op-ed essay this week in The Washington Times, Ken Tomlinson tells of a phone call from an old friend complaining about my bias. Wrote Mr. Tomlinson: "The friend explained that the foundation he heads made a six-figure contribution to his local television station for digital conversion. But he declared there would be no more contributions until something was done about the network's bias."

Apparently that's Kenneth Tomlinson's method of governance. Money talks and buys the influence it wants.

I would like to ask him to listen to a different voice.

This letter came to me last year from a woman in New York, five pages of handwriting. She said, among other things, that "After the worst sneak attack in our history, there's not been a moment to reflect, a moment to let the horror resonate, a moment to feel the pain and regroup as humans. No, since I lost my husband on 9/11, not only our family's world, but the whole world seems to have gotten even worse than that tragic day." She wanted me to know that on 9/11 her husband was not on duty. "He was home with me having coffee. My daughter and grandson, living only five blocks from the Towers, had to be evacuated with masks -- terror all around ... my other daughter, near the Brooklyn Bridge ... my son in high school. But my Charlie took off like a lightening bolt to be with his men from the Special Operations Command. 'Bring my gear to the plaza,' he told his aide immediately after the first plane struck the North Tower...He took action based on the responsibility he felt for his job and his men and for those Towers that he loved."

In the FDNY, she continued, chain-of- command rules extend to every captain of every fire house in the city. "If anything happens in the firehouse -- at any time -- even if the Captain isn't on duty or on vacation -- that Captain is responsible for everything that goes on there 24/7." So she asked: "Why is this Administration responsible for nothing? All that they do is pass the blame. This is not leadership... Watch everyone pass the blame again in this recent torture case [Abu Ghraib] of Iraqi prisons....."

She told me that she and her husband had watched my series on "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth" together and that now she was a faithful fan of NOW. She wrote: "We need more programs like yours to wake America up.... Such programs must continue amidst the sea of false images and name calling that divide America now....Such programs give us hope that search will continue to get this imperfect human condition on to a higher plane. So thank you and all of those who work with you. Without public broadcasting, all we would call news would be merely carefully controlled propaganda"

Enclosed with the letter was a check made out to "Channel 13 -NOW" for $500.

I keep a copy of that check above my desk to remind me of what journalism is about.

Kenneth Tomlinson has his demanding donors.

I'll take the widow's mite any day.

Someone has said recently that the great raucous mob that is democracy is rarely heard and that it's not just the fault of the current residents of the White House and the capital. There's too great a chasm between those of us in this business and those who depend on TV and radio as their window to the world. We treat them too much as an audience and not enough as citizens. They're invited to look through the window but too infrequently to come through the door and to participate, to make public broadcasting truly public.

To that end, five public interests groups including Common Cause and Consumers Union will be holding informational sessions around the country to "take public broadcasting back" -- to take it back from threats, from interference, from those who would tell us we can only think what they command us to think.

It's a worthy goal.

We're big kids; we can handle controversy and diversity, whether it's political or religious points of view or two loving lesbian moms and their kids, visited by a cartoon rabbit. We are not too fragile or insecure to see America and the world entire for all their magnificent and sometimes violent confusion. There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by," John Steinbeck wrote. "It was called the people."

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Finally a piece on how the big boys can control what was, as well as what is, if we are not careful:

http://www.fepproject.org/commentaries/structural.html

STRUCTURAL FREE EXPRESSION ISSUES: COPYRIGHT, GOVERNMENT FUNDING, AND MEDIA DEMOCRACY

By Marjorie Heins

Thank you for inviting me to participate in this fascinating, eclectic, cross-disciplinary exploration of "Government Policy, Cultural Production, and Personal Privacy." My contribution, "Structural Free Expression Issues," is, I admit, not the sexiest one in the annals of artistic freedom and censorship. A few years back, when I worked for the American Civil Liberties Union and later began the Free Expression Policy Project, I spent a lot of time thinking and talking about the somewhat racier subjects of sex and violence in American culture. But, as FEPP's work has developed, I've discovered that structural issues - how our copyright system is designed; who controls the mass media; how information is manipulated through funding and benefit programs - also have profound implications for free expression.

That is, who gets to speak the loudest and oftenest in America? In what forums? Whose voices are muted or barely heard? What information is suppressed, marginalized, or difficult to find? If, as the Supreme Court said more than 50 years ago, the First Amendment "rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public,"1 then the answers to these questions are, in the long run, more important than whether or not a particular art exhibit is censored, the manufacturer of a particular violent video game is sued for allegedly inspiring a crime, or the Federal Communications Commission fines a TV station half a million dollars for the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction."

Structural Issues: The Copyright System

Today, I want to address three structural free-expression issues. The first involves our current system of copyright control. Recent changes in law and technology have distorted the traditional balance between the "exclusive right" that the law grants to copyright owners and important free expression "safety valves" within the law, such as fair use and the public domain.

For example, the Copyright Clause of the Constitution authorizes Congress to grant copyrights for "limited times"; the first copyright law set the term at 14 years. The point was to give authors and inventors enough incentive to create by allowing them control over the sale and distribution of their works for a short time; then to move these creations into the public domain, where they could be freely borrowed, copied, and built upon to produce still more products of human ingenuity and imagination.

Slowly but steadily, Congress has undermined this "limited time" provision of the Constitution until, with its 1976 copyright law, it stretched the term of control to the life of the author plus 50 years for individuals and 75 years for corporations. Congress added another 20 years to this already generous allotment in 1998 with its "Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act," sometimes called the "Mickey Mouse law" because of the Disney Company's heavy lobbying for its passage. The copyright on the immortal cartoon rodent would have expired in 2003 if not for the latest term extension.

What does this abandonment of any reasonable interpretation of the constitutional mandate of "limited" copyright terms mean for art, culture, scholarship, and free expression? Let me give one example, from the many amicus curiae briefs submitted to the Supreme Court when it considered (and rejected) a constitutional challenge to the Sonny Bono law. I'm reading from the Free Expression Policy Project's report, called "The Progress of Science and Useful Arts": Why Copyright Today Threatens Intellectual Freedom. The College Art Association, the National Humanities Alliance, and other groups whose members study visual art explained [in their brief] that scholars assembling texts and databases often cannot locate the owners of copyrights in educationally valuable letters, songs, photos, and other documents. Indeed, most authors have neither the time nor the financial resources to do this gritty work of tracking down copyright permissions - though publishers generally expect them to. Without permissions, most publishers won't include the materials. As a result, said the College Art Association, there are "gaping holes" in such documentary compilations as The Video Encyclopedia of the Twentieth Century, a resource popular with researchers and teachers, and "Who Built America?," an award-winning CD-ROM series for high school and college students containing primary sources from the 1930s. The compilers of "Who Built America?" had great difficulty finding copyright owners, and those they found sometimes wanted large fees even where the works in question had no commercial value. Thus, they were forced to omit the Depression Era demagogue Huey Long's campaign song, "Every Man a King," as well as many clips from popular films of the time. They substituted government documents or other works in the public domain, but the result was an unbalanced picture of the era.

The brief described an art historian who was refused permission to use a photo of Pablo Picasso and his daughter because the copyright owner disagreed with the historian's analysis of Picasso's work. A publisher that planned a new critical edition of Cane, by the Harlem Renaissance author Jean Toomer, in part to counterbalance the bias against Toomer reflected in the only available edition, could not go ahead because of the copyright term extension on Cane. "In the past," the brief said, "researchers could anticipate and plan on new material becoming available for unrestricted use on a constant and continuing basis." But the law's 20-year "moratorium on the public domain" upsets those expectations and penalizes scholars, museums, teachers, and historians. All this in the interest of further enriching a relatively few copyright owners "who already have received significant value from their ownership under the preexisting term."

As this excerpt makes clear, it is not only the generalized effects on art and culture that are of concern when the public domain is frozen due to Congress' continuing extensions of the "limited time" of copyright. It is also the ability of copyright owners to censor ideas they don't like, as illustrated by the examples of Jean Toomer's Cane and Picasso's family photographs.

Congress created another structural problem in 1998 with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which essentially gives the force of law to "digital rights management" technologies, developed by media corporations to prevent unauthorized access to copyrighted works. The DMCA makes it a crime to circumvent such technologies, even for purposes of "fair use" under copyright law. Fair use is an important free expression safety valve that allows limited copying for such purposes as scholarship, journalism, commentary, and parody.

So, for example, a scholar who wants to copy a few frames of a film classic to show her class - a legitimate fair use - violates the DMCA if she circumvents encryption in order to access and copy even a small part of the film. Courts have recognized that the DMCA cripples the exercise of fair use, but so far have upheld the law anyway, as a justified congressional response to industry fears of illegal copying and lost income.

It's difficult to measure the cultural impact of these changes in the structure of the copyright system, but just as the increasing consolidation of the publishing industry in ever-fewer hands, and its drive for ever-larger profit margins dramatically affects what books are promoted and distributed, so the difficulties of our film scholar and millions like her in exercising their fair use rights have wide-ranging systemic effects.

The Structure of Mass Communications

Mass media consolidation is my second example of a structural free expression issue. The FCC's decision last year to relax its rules limiting the percent of national audience that any single media company can reach, and restricting various forms of media cross-ownership and multiple ownership in local markets, gave rise to widespread protests; this June, a federal court overturned nearly all of the FCC's order. These battles over further media consolidation of an already dangerously concentrated industry, in which six corporate conglomerates control nearly 80% of network television content and one company, Clear Channel, owns more than 1200 radio stations,3 are important, but there is a more basic problem with our current mass media structure.

The problem starts with a system of broadcast regulation that first proclaims the airwaves to be a national resource, communally owned, that should be dedicated to serving the public interest; then turns over virtually all of the broadcast spectrum to commercial entities that are essentially in the business - to use the straightforward terminology of the industry - of delivering eyeballs to advertisers. Radio and TV companies that enjoy the scarce privilege of a broadcast license are supposed to serve the public interest - to deliver art, entertainment, and news from a range of viewpoints, to cover issues and events of local interest, and to reflect the cultural diversity of our population. But these lofty principles inevitably conflict with both the profit-maximizing goals of media corporations and the political interests of their owners, and attempts to enforce them have been both intermittent and ineffective.

A mandated few hours per week of so-called educational programming, for example, and a statutory requirement that broadcasters give equal time to candidates for office, do not go very far when the TV broadcaster still chooses the program content, reduces the amount of time spent on political reportage (as opposed to airing lucrative but often deceptive campaign ads), and suppresses anything that its owners deem politically inconvenient. Michael Moore had the wherewithal to find other means of reaching the American public when Disney refused to distribute his Fahrenheit 9/11 because the company did not want to offend Florida Governor Jeb Bush, but most media corporations' forays into political self-censorship do succeed in suppressing or marginalizing controversial speech. The examples are legion: from Sinclair Broadcasting, which owns 62 TV stations, refusing to air a Nightline program focusing on American military deaths in Iraq, to Viacom/CBS's decision to pull the Ronald Reagan miniseries from its primetime schedule, to Time-Warner-owned CNN's rejecting an ad from the Log Cabin Republicans urging tolerance on gay issues.

The solution must start where the problem began: not with "deregulation," as free-market theorists suggest, but with the re-structuring of a broadcast system that turns over the public airwaves almost entirely to for-profit corporations.

Another current battle over media regulation involves cable broadband Internet access. The issue here is whether this increasingly popular means of getting online will be treated as a "telecommunications service" like the phone company, and therefore a common carrier which cannot control the content of speech that goes over its wires, or as an unregulated "information service," which can exercise content control, discriminate against Web sites it dislikes, and refuse to allow other service providers to sell Internet access over its cables. The FCC supports the cable industry's claim to be an "information service" for purposes of broadband access; the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently overturned that FCC ruling, and both the government and the cable industry are asking for Supreme Court review.5 It does not take a rocket scientist to see that if the FCC wins this case, monopolistic cable companies could quickly transform the Internet from a worldwide soapbox with easy access to vast and diverse resources, into another mass medium dominated by games, shopping, and homogeneous, often superficial commercial news and entertainment.

The Structure of Government Funding

My last structural free expression issue involves conditions on government benefits or funding. Because the First Amendment limits government's ability to control speech directly, it often uses this carrot-and-stick approach. That is - to take one well-known example - Congress passes a law prohibiting funding for art that is thought to violate "general standards of decency" or the "diverse beliefs and values of the American public." In 1998, the Supreme Court upheld this law restricting the National Endowment for the Arts' discretion in awarding grants. The Court reasoned that although the First Amendment would not allow Congress to impose these sorts of ideological restrictions directly, they are perfectly reasonable criteria for federal spending.

This was, perhaps, a prudent decision, given the highly charged politics of arts funding. And it is true, as opponents of free expression in arts funding never tired of pointing out, that artists are free to create whatever they want "on their own time, and their own dime." But there is no denying that "decency" and "respect" criteria for federal arts grants have a widespread systemic effect on the visibility of controversial art within our culture - indeed, on the very financial ability to create it. Government grants leverage significant amounts of private money, not to mention prestige.

And although to many, the Court's decision seemed reasonable in the context of arts funding, just try applying it to a government-funded institution such as a university. A law prohibiting all faculty, staff, and resources at SUNY Buffalo from engaging in any expression that violates "general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public" would have profoundly negative effects on academic freedom, which is at the center of a university's mission.

Another funding law, mandating Internet filters on all computers in libraries that receive federal aid for Internet connections, or even just the benefit of a federally mandated e-rate discount, was also upheld by the Supreme Court last year - reversing a lower court decision that detailed the irrationality of filters' operations, and the tens of thousands of valuable Web sites they block, even at their narrowest settings.

This was Congress' third attempt to restrict expression online, and the irony is that the Supreme Court struck down the first two even though they would have had much less sweeping censorship effects than the third law, mandating Internet filters. The reason for the difference: the first two laws directly banned speech deemed "indecent" or "harmful to minors"8; the third technically did not ban anything - it simply gave libraries a choice: if you think Internet filters are dangerous tools that contradict the very core of a library's mission, the answer is simple: don't accept e-rate discounts or government funds.

Of course, it is an illusory choice for many libraries, especially the ones in lower income communities for which the e-rate was created. Building censorship into the structure of funding and other benefit programs enables government to establish a systemic regime of disfavoring and disadvantaging non-mainstream and provocative art and ideas more pervasively than it could ever do by means of direct censorship.

The same sort of structural free expression problems exist, as I've suggested, under the systems in place to govern copyright and the mass media industry. The challenge today is to understand how these structures impact free expression, and find ways to promote systemic change.

Thats all Folks!

Colin