Let’s Stop Big Media’s (B)AD Behavior

Friday, March 30, 2012 by Common Dreams
by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship


Over the years we’ve been reporting on how power is monopolized by the powerful. How corporate lobbyists, for example, far outnumber members of Congress. And how the politicians are so eager to do the bidding of donors that they allow those lobbyists to dictate the law of the land and make a farce of democracy. What we have is much closer to plutocracy, where the massive concentration of wealth at the top protects and perpetuates itself by controlling the ends and means of politics. This is why so many of us despair over fixing what’s wrong: we elect representatives to change things, and once in office they wind up serving the deep-pocketed donors who put up the money to keep change from happening at all.

Here’s the latest case in point. The airwaves belong to all of us, right? They’re part of “the commons” that in theory no private interest should be able to buy or control. Nonetheless, government long ago allowed television and radio stations to use the airwaves for commercial purposes, and the advertising revenues have made those companies fabulously rich. But part of the deal was that in return for the privilege of reaping a fortune they would respect the public interest in a variety of ways, including covering the local news important to our communities. If they didn’t, they would be denied their license to use the airwaves at all.

Alas, over the years, through one ruse or another, the public has been shafted. We heard the other day of a candidate for office in a Midwest state who complained to the general manager of a TV station that his campaign was not getting any news coverage. “You want coverage?” the broadcaster replied. “Buy some ads and then we’ll talk!”

That pretty well sums up the game. But hold your nose: it gets worse. The media companies and their local stations – including goliaths like CBS and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp – stand to pull in as much as $3 billion this year from political ads. Three billion dollars! And most of that money will pay for airing ugly, toxic negative ads that use special effects, snide jokes and flat out deception to take us to the lowest common denominator of politics.

The FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, which is supposed to make sure the broadcasters don’t completely get away with highway or, rather, airwave robbery has proposed to the broadcasting cartel that stations post on the Web the names of the billionaires, and front organizations – many of them super PACs — paying for campaign ads. It’s simplicity itself: give citizens access online to find out quickly and directly who’s buying our elections. Hardly an unreasonable request, given how much cash the broadcasters make from their free use of the airwaves.

But the broadcasting industry’s response has been a simple, declarative “Not on your life!” It would cost too much money, they claim. Speaking on their behalf, Robert McDowell, currently the only Republican commissioner on the FCC – the other one left to take a job with media monolith Comcast — said the proposal is likely “to be a jobs destroyer” by distracting station employees from doing their regular work. The party line also has been sounded by Jerald Fritz, senior vice president of Allbritton Communications, who told the FCC that making the information available on the Internet “would ultimately lead to a Soviet-style standardization of the way advertising should be sold as determined by the government.” We’re not making this up.

Steven Waldman, who was lead author of the report that led to the FCC’s online proposal, quotes a letter from the deans of twelve of our best journalism schools: “Broadcast news organizations depend on, and consistently call for, robust open-record regimes for the institutions they cover; it seems hypocritical for broadcasters to oppose applying the same principles to themselves.”

Hypocritical, but consistent with a business that values the almighty dollar over public service. The industry leaves nothing to chance. Through its control of the House of Representatives, it got a piece of legislation passed this past week euphemistically titled the FCC Process Reform Act. George Orwell must be spinning in his grave – this isn’t reform, it’s evisceration.

Not only does the bill remove roadblocks to more media mergers – further reducing competition – it would subject every new rule and every FCC analysis of that rule to years of paper work and judicial review, enabling the industry’s horde of lawyers and lobbyists, “to throw sand in the works at every opportunity” as one expert puts it. There was a noble attempt by California Congresswoman Anna Eshoo to include in this bill an amendment that, like the FCC proposal, called for stations to post on-line who’s putting up the big bucks for political ads. Shocker — it was rejected. Score another one for the plutocrats.

There is some good news. The White House opposes this latest bid by the broadcasting oligarchy to further eviscerate the public interest. And the fate of the House bill in the Senate is uncertain at best. In the meantime, as far as those political ads go, we’re not totally helpless. Here’s what you can do: Under current law, local television stations still have to keep paper files of who’s paying for these political ads, and they have to make those files available to the public if requested. You can even make copies to take away with you. So just go down to your nearest station, politely ask for the records, and then send the data online to the New America Foundation’s Media Policy Initiative or to the organization of investigative journalists called ProPublica. Both have mounted campaigns to get the information online.

Each is pulling together all the information on political ads they get from you and others — crowdsourcing — and making it available to the entire country via the Internet. If you’re a high school teacher or college professor of journalism, have your students do it and maybe give them classroom credit for collecting the data democracy needs to work.

The Misinformation Machine

Friday, March 9, 2012 by MediaCitizen
by Tim Karr


Dirty politics is a growth industry with few happy customers. In the run-up to Super Tuesday, television viewers nationwide had to endure an onslaught of negative and deceptive political ads.

For many in key primary and caucus states that meant sitting through up to 12 such ads an hour. And the vast majority of these ads went on the attack: The three political action committees buying the most television time this election season have spent more than 98 percent of their money on ads that discredit one or another candidate, according to Kantar Media.
These attacks by their very nature are misleading. FactCheck.org, which tracks accuracy in political messaging, found that the "avalanche of negativity" in recent political ads also contained a fair share of distortions and lies.

In February, Restore Our Future, the pro-Mitt Romney Super PAC, pushed an ad portraying Newt Gingrich as a supporter of China's one-child policy, a claim that sent the lie detectors at Politifact spinning.

Meanwhile, the pro-Santorum camp fired a salvo in Super Tuesday states with an ad claiming Romney left Massachusetts $1 billion in debt during his time as governor. Also false.

And it doesn't end with attacks on Republicans. An ad from the shadowy American Future Fund attempts to tar President Obama by listing dozens of former Wall Street executives allegedly serving under the president in the White House. One problem: Half of the people on the list never actually worked as Wall Street executives. As for the names of those financing the American Future Fund ad, the independent political group -- like all other Super PACs and 501(c)(4)s -- has no legal obligation to disclose.

The Real News Antidote
In this era of deceptive political ads, TV viewers don't receive enough of the antidote: the kind of hard-hitting reporting and election coverage that would help local voters separate political fact from fiction before they pick a candidate.

A 2011 Federal Communications Commission report found that 33 percent of commercial TV stations nationwide air little to no local news coverage. For those that do air news, the picture remains dim. Nearly two-thirds of local stations reported staff cuts in 2009 as owners focused on maximizing their profit margins. This has translated into fewer reporters on the political beat and less objective reporting about electoral issues.

A 2010 report by USC's Annenberg School of Communications shows that in the average 30-minute local news broadcast, less than 30 seconds is devoted to hard local government news, including reporting on political campaigns. Meanwhile, it's estimated that political ads will air up to 200,000 times nationwide before viewers become voters in November.

But what was bad for viewers and voters on Super Tuesday has been a boon for local broadcasters. Even after the rise of the Internet, local broadcast television has remained our most influential communications medium. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 78 percent of American viewers report getting their news from their hometown stations on a typical day -- more than the number that rely on newspapers, radio or the Internet.

Collateral Damage
Where viewers go, so goes the money to influence their votes. Industry analysts report that local television station advertising revenue is "going gangbusters" in 2012 as changes to campaign finance rules will unleash an estimated $3.3 billion in political ad buys across the country.

The media industry even has a term for this, "the Quadrennial Effect," which accounts for the surge in broadcast revenues every four years as national elections take center stage. The biggest beneficiaries are media corporations that control local broadcast television stations in battleground states. That group includes CBS Corp., Gannett Co., Media General and News Corp. All of these conglomerates have bought up stations in battleground states where cyclical election ad spending is concentrated.

What they don't want you to know, however, is that the broadcasters' rush to air political ads has caused collateral damage.

It is accepted wisdom among the campaigns and Super PACs that a political lie hammered repeatedly into the collective consciousness of the electorate will embed itself in the minds of many as truth. Spreading lies via an endless drumbeat of attack ads works especially well at a time when the press, by and large, doesn't question them.

And while all broadcast stations are legally entitled to reject outright any third-party political ad that pedals misinformation, few do.
Thus far in 2012, FactCheck.org hasn't found a single instance where a station has rejected a political ad for inaccuracy. 

"It's not to the advertisers or stations' competitive advantage to publicize this fact," says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which runs FactCheck.org. "So the likelihood that we'll hear about this is low."

The irony, of course, is that stations pay a higher price for deciding to debunk political misinformation and pursue the truth. That's not the way media are supposed to function in a democracy.

They could correct course by spending some of their election-year profits on the kind of quality political reporting that viewers need before they go to the polls. They could devote more news coverage to exposing the wealthy individuals and corporations funding attack ads. They could do a better job of opening their own political files to public scrutiny to shed light on the Super PACs and independent groups that trade in deception.

But will they? With so much political ad money up for grabs in 2012, few broadcasters are willing to bite the hands that feed them. And that's bad news for anyone who believes the media should serve democracy and not merely profit from its demise.