journalism – Page 4

Dow Jones, Murdoch and media consolidation

Josh Silver — executive director of Free Press, an organizationformed “to engage citizens in media policy debates and create a more democratic and diverse media system” — offers a broader take on the Dow Jones sale that goes beyond Rupert Murdoch to the system that enables folks like him. He writes:

Above all, we ought to be most concerned with the health of our media system. Media consolidation, by its nature, diminishes the diversity of voices represented in our media or able to access to the presses and the airwaves. With fewer points of view available, those select few with an outlet increase their capacity to shape public opinion, politics and daily life. It is easy to make Murdoch a target, but this deal is not about one man so much as it is about a whole system of policies that creates a rich media but a poor democracy.

Some may say we should just let the market take its course. But today’s media system isn’t simply the evolutionary result of “market forces at work.” It’s the result of policies created by Congress and enforced by the FCC. Without those policies, Murdoch couldn’t have built his media empire. Only by restoring public input in the
policymaking process, can we reverse this trend and make America’s media a healthier place where a marketplace of ideas and the free market can co-exist.

We can’t change Rupert Murdoch. But we can change the policies that allow companies like News Corp. to control our media. We can create new policies that oster the kind of diverse, accessible and vibrant media that our country’s founders imagined and our democracy needs.

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Feeling blue about Rupert

The Audit, the Columbia Journalism Review’s indispensible blog, offers an interview with James Ottaway, that is one of the best pieces on the News Corp. wooing of the Dow Jones board that I’ve come across. (CJR also ran this absolutely terrifying online profile of Murdoch last week that is a must read for anyone interested in the future of The Wall Street Journal and American journalism.)

The Murdoch sale, according to Ottaway, a shreholder who “ran the largely profitable Ottaway unit within Dow Jones, and held various other posts until 2003, and served on the board of directors until last year,” says a News Corp. takeover would result in “more media concentration in the hands the people who use their media power for personal, political, and business interests, as Murdoch does so blatantly with the New York Post, FOX News network, Star TV in China, Phoenix TV in China.”

That, he says, violates the American tradition of journalism.

The American tradition, which I think is a higher standard, produces a higher-quality of journalism. This wasn’t (always the case) from the founding of the country when we had highly partisan press run by political parties and individuals. Jefferson starting a newspaper to attack Adams when they were running for president. We’re a long way from that. But since the Second World War, the principle has been that in your news columns, you report accurately, fairly, as objectively as you can. And on your editorial pages, you can state your personal political—business interests if you want—but generally, American journalism has been to act with a sense of public service in the way you run your newspapers and to consider a newspaper…a public trust, and not just a personal piggybank.

Otherwise, he says, you have “capitalism gone crazy.”

What we’re in danger of losing is fact-based journalism that serves as a basis for public debate. I fear for the country if we do not have unbiased news sources available to every citizen so that they can hear all sides of major public issues and make intelligent decisions when they vote or speak for or against candidates or issues; where the information is based on some agreed-upon factual starting point. Otherwise everything is propaganda and biased information, and nobody knows what the truth is.

And he offers this final thought:

I am saying privately to many of the Bancrofts, and would say publicly: We should not sell Dow Jones and Ottaway Newspapers to Rupert Murdoch. If some of the family members want to sell their Dow Jones shares, let us find a way to buy them out that is not damaging to Dow Jones and its reputation for absolute integrity in reporting and analyzing global business news. Let us find new investors to help us build the company, and not sell it to a company like News Corp, whose core business is entertainment, and whose newspapers are either tabloid fluff or weapons to enhance the business and political interests of Rupert Murdoch.

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Terror alert, II

This post from the Columbia Journalism Review touches on what I wrote earlier about the Fort Dix terror case:

It’s hard for the press not to run with stories of possible domestic terrorism, and for good reason — it’s serious and scary business. That said, not all plots are created equal, and lumping them all together into one grab bag of thwarted domestic terrorism cases is something reporters should avoid, especially given some of the absurd plots that have been uncovered over the last couple years. This is not to say that all leads shouldn’t be investigated — they should — or that anyone discovered in any stage of planning an attack shouldn’t be scooped up — they should– but we’ve seen a couple of cases in the last few years be blown way out of proportion, and that makes us wonder what the Fort Dix story will become.

Those cases, Paul McLeary writes, should have remained in the front-brain of reporters as they entered the vortex of the story.

The Bush administration’s Justice Department has a vested interest in portraying every “plot” it busts as the next 9/11, regardless of how embryonic or feeble. It serves as a distraction from the administration’s failures in Iraq and elsewhere, it perpetuates the state of fear that has served this White House well in recent years, and it justifies the massive Homeland Security bureaucracy. Journalists, meanwhile, are at a decided disadvantage when trying to determine the seriousness — or lack thereof — of the threat, because the government holds all the cards. That’s why a healthy dose of skepticism — given this administration’s track record with truth — is crucial to the press’s handling of stories like Fort Dix. These would-be terrorists in New Jersey should be taken seriously, at least until we have reason to believe they
shouldn’t. We’re only a couple of days into this story, but it’s never too early to watch for the hype, and watch for how the press either runs with it, or turns a skeptical eye.

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Sticks, stones and Bill O’Reilly

Here’s a study that essentially proves what we’d already suspected — that conservative talk show host Bill O’Reilly is a fear-monger and a bully, forcing the world to fit into a neat “good v. evil”/”us v. them” paradigm and using this paradigm to generate ratings and create conservative propaganda.

(That his show has grown increasingly weird as the conservative moment wanes should be a topic for another study, but alas….)

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