Crimes Against Nature (24 page)

Not long ago, people scoffed at the suggestion that a network’s corporate owner would censor news out of self-interest. That can’t happen in America, right? But times have changed. Everybody saw how CBS genuflected to the right wing and the Republican National Committee to pull a docudrama that was critical of Ronald Reagan. (CBS’s hypervigilance, of course, did not apply to Janet Jackson’s naked breast.) The Reagan show was tasteless and historically inaccurate, but that’s never stopped CBS from airing similar shows about other prominent political figures. Despite having the highest-rated show on his network, Phil Donahue got sacked by MSNBC because of his liberal philosophy. MSNBC replaced him with a right-wing bigot, Michael Savage.

The corporate bias infects nearly every major news outlet. Michael Eisner has said that he doesn’t want ABC News to report critically on Disney, its parent company. In May 2004, Eisner canceled distribution of Michael Moore’s
Fahrenheit 9/11
— a screed against George W. Bush. According to Moore’s agent, Ari Emmanuel, Eisner feared that Governor Jeb Bush would rescind tax breaks now granted to the company’s Florida theme parks. What about behemoths like GE, which has subsidiaries with financial stakes in myriad public policy debates from war to pollution?

I have considerable personal experience with corporate censorship. Charles Grodin often reminds me that I got him fired from the best job he ever had — as a nightly talk-show host on MSNBC. On November 11, 1996, Grodin had me on his show to plug my book
Riverkeepers.
Unlike the more seasoned MSNBC and NBC hosts, he allowed me to talk at length about the record of the network’s parent company, GE. I talked about GE’s massive pollution of the Hudson River, about the fact that GE owns more Superfund sites than any other company, and that, thanks to GE pollution, hundreds of fishermen were now jobless, while then-CEO Jack Welch took home an $85 million salary plus bonuses.

A few months later his bosses canceled the show so suddenly that Grodin didn’t even get to say good-bye. In a postmortem column, New York
Newsday
journalist Marvin Kitman mourned the surprise sacking of Grodin, which he attributed to my interview. Kitman commented that my appearance “was the longest attack on a General Electric–owned network on GE for polluting the Hudson” and lamented that Grodin “was one of the things that was good about TV, a genuine original, the closest thing we had to an Oscar Levant in this age of mellow-mouth talk-show hosts.”
⁴⁴
According to Grodin, Ralph Nader called Jack Welch to protest the sacking, but Welch never returned the call.

I regularly run afoul of corporate censors and bean counters who decide television content. In November 2003, when environmentalists around the country were engaged in fighting the Cheney energy bill, the NRDC was anxiously trying to get me airtime because no one was talking about the bill on TV. Fox TV host Bill O’Reilly agreed to schedule me, but only with the explicit proviso that I wouldn’t say critical things about GeorgeW. Bush. I would first have to do a pre-interview to make sure I was capable of talking about the environment without bad-mouthing the president. Later, Fox decided that even this was too chancy; they would just tape the show, rather than risk me going off the reservation on live TV. The same week, Tom Brokaw, a committed environmentalist and fly fisherman, scheduled me for a segment on
NBC Nightly News
— but the producers bumped me for yet another Michael Jackson story.

I was most disappointed by Aaron Brown of CNN. When Ted Turner owned the network, CNN was a bastion of environmental reporting in the wasteland of network news shows. Turner employed an environmental specialist, Barbara Pyle, as a full-time advocate for environmental programming. But CNN then became an AOL Time Warner property, and on the day I was scheduled to appear, one of Brown’s producers called to cancel the interview. Brown, she said, was aware of my criticism of the president’s environmental record and was canceling my appearance because he didn’t want any “Bush bashing” on his show. Brown, too, substituted the interview with me for a segment on Michael Jackson’s sex scandal.

I was at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the next morning to give a speech. As I waited for the elevator, I read the Journalist’s Creed from the plaque in the foyer:

Sleazy scoundrels like Steven Griles and Jeffrey Holmstead or medicine-show fakirs like John Graham make the endlessly broadcast Clinton-Whitewater scandal look like a Sunday-school romp, yet they are invisible in the press. “The networks are owned by big corporations and they’re mainly Republican,” DNC chairman Terry McCauliffe recently complained to me. “It’s a heavy lift getting them to cover corporate control issues or to criticize a Republican president.”

Public interest advocates can’t criticize corporations on the airwaves even when they have the money. Moveon.org learned this lesson when they tried unsuccessfully to air an ad criticizing President Bush’s corporate coddling during the Super Bowl. In 2003, when Laurie David and Arianna Huffington’s “Detroit Project” attempted to air paid advertisements touting automobile fuel efficiency, the networks, which make $15 billion annually from the auto industry, refused to carry the ads. “They wouldn’t run them,” Huffington told me. “And we ended basically not being able to use the money that was budgeted to buy airtime.”
⁴⁵
Huffington turned to Laurie David, a former David Letterman producer whose husband, Larry David, created
Seinfeld
and the popular series
Curb Your Enthusiasm.
“I met with Lloyd Braun, the president of ABC,” David told me, “and brought the commercial up there to see if they could run the ads. He pretty much laughed me out of the office. He said, ‘We have three offices. We have an office in Los Angeles, we have an office in New York City, and our third office is in Detroit.’ There was no way he was going to put something on his network that might piss off the auto industry.”
⁴⁶

When George W. Bush arrived at the White House, there was still one significant media law in place: No media company was allowed to dominate any one particular market. But Bush’s FCC is looking sideways while the media giants violate this restriction. FCC regulations prohibit ownership of more than 8 radio stations in a single market. A recent study of 337 cities by the Center for Public Integrity found giant corporations owning more than 8 stations in 34 of them.
⁴⁷
Clear Channel is the big kahuna, with 11 of the 17 radio stations in Mansfield, Ohio.
⁴⁸
Second in size after Clear Channel is right-wing Cumulus Media, which enforced skinhead-style censorship when it blackballed the Dixie Chicks for criticizing President Bush. Cumulus owns 8 of the 15 stations in Albany, Georgia.
⁴⁹
In every city surveyed, a single company owns at least one-third of the radio outlets.
⁵⁰

The TV companies are engaged in the same shenanigans. The FCC rule that forbids ownership of more than one TV station in any market has been broken in 43 cities surveyed by the Center for Public Integrity. Recently, for example, Fox’s affiliate in Wilmington, North Carolina, was purchased by a company that turns out to be a sister subsidiary of the company that already owns the NBC affiliate. They fired staff and combined newsrooms, so now one media company controls two of Wilmington’s three stations.
⁵¹
When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought Chris Craft’s TV stations and Viacom merged with CBS in 2000, both companies were suddenly violating FCC rules prohibiting a single entity from owning stations reaching over 35 percent of the national audience. The FCC, now chaired by merger-maniac Michael Powell, solved the problem by handing both companies temporary waivers.
⁵²
Then the FCC tried to make the waivers permanent by raising the limit on market share.
⁵³
This new FCC rollback will unleash the largest wave of media consolidation in U.S. history. The new rules allow gigantic media conglomerates to buy television stations reaching 45 percent of the nation’s viewers and to own newspaper, radio, and television stations in the same city.

Chairman Powell, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s son, conducted his rule-making proceedings in virtual secrecy, confining debate to a single public hearing in Richmond, Virginia, on February 27, 2003. Not surprisingly, it received very little attention from the TV networks. The big newspaper chains — the
New York Times,
Knight Ridder, and Gannett — enjoying their own unprecedented consolidations and creating their own plans to enter the television market — all but blacked out coverage as well. In June 2003, Powell and his two Republican commissioners announced the deal as a fait accompli.

But Powell’s corporate sop ignited a firestorm as conservatives, frightened by the prospect of monolithic corporate control of the nation’s fundamental freedom, joined liberals in protest. Senator John McCain pointed out that a similar media consolidation had subverted Russia’s new democracy. Conservative columnist William Safire campaigned in favor of bipartisan legislation in the Senate to kill the deal. Public pressure forced Powell to reopen the process and hold open meetings in cities across the United States. A record 2.4 million people wrote letters opposing the rollbacks,
⁵⁴
recognizing what George W. Bush and Michael Powell apparently do not — that the control of our media by a half-dozen powerful multinationals who can dictate what we hear, see, and read is dangerous for our communities, our families, and our democracy.

The Senate voted to stop the deal, and the House had sufficient votes to do the same. But the White House, working with Tom DeLay, the media moguls, and their lobbyists, blocked the vote. Fortunately, in June the federal court of appeals in Philadelphia rejected the FCC’s rollbacks, citing a lack of “reasoned analysis,” and directed the agency to start over.
⁵⁵

Nevertheless, absent a resurrection of the Fairness Doctrine, our nation’s broadcast media, which should be an open forum for our democracy, will continue to devolve into a marketplace exclusively for commerce. It allows these corporations to extend the reach of their empires into American homes with customized, interactive multimedia content hell-bent on transforming us into 24-hour-a-day consumers. The so-called news and entertainment content will be dictated by advertisers with personalized appeals calculated to program us to buy, buy, buy. Meanwhile, our civic life, already invisible on TV, will become an irrelevant relic to the next generation, which will know little about the issues or why they should participate in democracy.

Y
ou show me a polluter and I’ll show you a subsidy. I’ll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and load his production costs onto the backs of the public.

The fact is, free-market capitalism is the best thing that could happen to our environment, our economy, our country. Simply put, true free-market capitalism, in which businesses pay all the costs of bringing their products to market, is the most efficient and democratic way of distributing the goods of the land — and the surest way to eliminate pollution. Free markets, when allowed to function, properly value raw materials and encourage producers to eliminate waste — pollution — by reducing, reusing, and recycling.

As Jim Hightower likes to say, “The free market is a great thing — we should try it some time.”

In a real free-market economy, when you make yourself rich, you enrich your community. But polluters make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise the standard of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everyone else. And they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market.

The coal-burning utilities that acidify the Adirondack lakes, poison our waterways with mercury, provoke 120,000 asthma attacks, and kill 30,000 of our neighbors every year are imposing costs on the rest of us that should, in a free-market economy, be reflected in the price of the energy when they bring it to the marketplace. By avoiding these costs, the utilities are able to enrich their shareholders and put their more conscientious and efficient competitors out of business. But these costs don’t disappear. The American people pay for them downstream — with poisoned fish, sickened children, and a diminished quality of life. Every one of our federal environmental laws is intended to restore true free-market capitalism so that the price of bringing a product to market reflects the costs that it imposes on the public.

The truth is, I don’t even think of myself as an environmentalist anymore. I consider myself a free-marketeer. Along with my colleagues at the NRDC and Waterkeeper, I go out into the marketplace and catch the cheaters. We tell them, “We’re going to force you to internalize your costs the same as you internalize your profits.” Because when polluters cheat, it distorts the entire marketplace, and none of us benefits from the efficiencies and democracy that the free market promises.

Corporate capitalists don’t want free markets, they want dependable profits, and their surest route is to crush the competition by controlling the government. The domination of our government by large corporations leads to the elimination of markets and, ultimately, to the loss of democracy.