Krugman on Media Self Censorship and Support for Incumbent Policies

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: "Robert J. Berger" <rberger () ibd com>
Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 23:13:27 -0700
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>, Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Krugman on Media Self Censorship and Support for Incumbent Policies

May 13, 2003
The China Syndrome
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/13/opinion/13KRUG.html?pagewanted=print&posit
ion=

A funny thing happened during the Iraq war: many Americans turned to the BBC
for their TV news. They were looking for an alternative point of view ‹
something they couldn't find on domestic networks, which, in the words of
the BBC's director general, "wrapped themselves in the American flag and
substituted patriotism for impartiality."

Leave aside the rights and wrongs of the war itself, and consider the
paradox. The BBC is owned by the British government, and one might have
expected it to support that government's policies. In fact, however, it
tried hard ‹ too hard, its critics say ‹ to stay impartial. America's TV
networks are privately owned, yet they behaved like state-run media.

What explains this paradox? It may have something to do with the China
syndrome. No, not the one involving nuclear reactors ‹ the one exhibited by
Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation when dealing with the government of the
People's Republic.

In the United States, Mr. Murdoch's media empire ‹ which includes Fox News
and The New York Post ‹ is known for its flag-waving patriotism. But all
that patriotism didn't stop him from, as a Fortune article put it,
"pandering to China's repressive regime to get his programming into that
vast market." The pandering included dropping the BBC's World Service ‹
which reports news China's government doesn't want disseminated ‹ from his
satellite programming, and having his publishing company cancel the
publication of a book critical of the Chinese regime.

Can something like that happen in this country? Of course it can. Through
its policy decisions ‹ especially, though not only, decisions involving
media regulation ‹ the U.S. government can reward media companies that
please it, punish those that don't. This gives private networks an incentive
to curry favor with those in power. Yet because the networks aren't
government-owned, they aren't subject to the kind of scrutiny faced by the
BBC, which must take care not to seem like a tool of the ruling party. So we
shouldn't be surprised if America's "independent" television is far more
deferential to those in power than the state-run systems in Britain or ‹ for
another example ‹ Israel.

A recent report by Stephen Labaton of The Times contained a nice
illustration of the U.S. government's ability to reward media companies that
do what it wants. The issue was a proposal by Michael Powell, chairman of
the Federal Communications Commission, to relax regulations on media
ownership. The proposal, formally presented yesterday, may be summarized as
a plan to let the bigger fish eat more of the smaller fish. Big media
companies will be allowed to have a larger share of the national market and
own more TV stations in any given local market, and many restrictions on
"cross-ownership" ‹ owning radio stations, TV stations and newspapers in the
same local market ‹ will be lifted.

The plan's defects aside ‹ it will further reduce the diversity of news
available to most people ‹ what struck me was the horse-trading involved.
One media group wrote to Mr. Powell, dropping its opposition to part of his
plan "in return for favorable commission action" on another matter. That was
indiscreet, but you'd have to be very naïve not to imagine that there are a
lot of implicit quid pro quos out there.

And the implicit trading surely extends to news content. Imagine a TV news
executive considering whether to run a major story that might damage the
Bush administration ‹ say, a follow-up on Senator Bob Graham's charge that a
Congressional report on Sept. 11 has been kept classified because it would
raise embarrassing questions about the administration's performance. Surely
it would occur to that executive that the administration could punish any
network running that story.

Meanwhile, both the formal rules and the codes of ethics that formerly
prevented blatant partisanship are gone or ignored. Neil Cavuto of Fox News
is an anchor, not a commentator. Yet after Baghdad's fall he told "those who
opposed the liberation of Iraq" ‹ a large minority ‹ that "you were
sickening then; you are sickening now." Fair and balanced.

We don't have censorship in this country; it's still possible to find
different points of view. But we do have a system in which the major media
companies have strong incentives to present the news in a way that pleases
the party in power, and no incentive not to.


--
Robert J. Berger - Internet Bandwidth Development, LLC.
Voice: 408-882-4755 eFax: +1-408-490-2868
http://www.ibd.com



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