[Vision2020] Major Shift In Media:Court Cases, etc.

[Tbertruss at aol.com]

Tim et. al.

Below I post excerpts of work from Salon.com by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (the 
work is not available directly off the salon.com site) providing information on 
changes made in the courts and in law regarding regulation of media that 
offers evidence to support my claim that there has been a major shift in the media 
in the past half century that is negatively impacting Democracy in the USA.  
Note the 1969 US Supreme Court Red Lion case upholding the Fairness Doctrine 
applied to media, which was abandoned in 1988 under the Reagan Administration, 
with Reagan vetoing bills coming from the US Congress aimed at sustaining the 
Fairness doctrine.

Actual changes in law regarding regulation of media are allowing media to be 
less fair and accurate, and get away with it!

So what is your response to these changes in law regarding media regulation 
that support my thesis, Tim?

Ted Moffett

I recently asked Fox News president Roger Ailes why the networks don't cover 
environmental stories. Roger is an old friend with whom I spent a summer 
camping in Africa almost 30 years ago. He is jovial, animated and genuinely funny, 
and we loathe each other's politics. After considering the question for a 
moment, he said, "It's because environmental stories are not fast-breaking!" News, 
it seems, has to be entertaining because that's what sells. 

The networks are contaminating the airwaves with high-profile murders and 
celebrity gossip, leaving ever-diminishing time for real news. They've dumbed 
down the news to its lowest common denominator. It's all Laci Peterson and Kobe 
Bryant all the time. Notorious crimes and sex scandals have little real 
relevance to our lives, our country, our democracy. At best, they are entertainment; 
at worst, pornography. The Monica Lewinsky story got such play in part because 
it was an excuse to deal pornography packaged as news. That stuff may sell 
papers, but it leaves little room for the asthma stories, for news that really 
affects our lives. 

But Roger Ailes' response omitted another factor: Environmental stories often 
challenge a network's ideology or corporate self-interest. Many major media 
outlets are controlled by companies that have a vested interest in keeping 
environmental disasters under wraps: NBC is owned by General Electric, the world's 
biggest polluter, with a world record 86 Superfund sites. Until three years 
ago, CBS was owned by Westinghouse, which has 39 Superfund sites. Westinghouse 
is also the world's largest owner of nuclear power plants and the 
third-largest manufacturer of nuclear weapons. 

In 2003, the North American winners of the prestigious Goldman Environmental 
Prize, known as the "Nobel Prize for grassroots work," were former Fox TV 
reporters Jane Akre and Steve Wilson. The two investigative reporters claim that 
they lost their jobs at Tampa's Fox-owned WTVT when they refused to doctor a 
news report that had displeased Monsanto. The reporters had visited regional 
dairies and discovered that Monsanto's controversial bovine growth hormone (BGH) 
was being injected into cows by virtually every dairyman in the region. The 
chemical was present in virtually all the state's milk supply, despite 
commitments by Florida's supermarkets not to sell milk tainted by the hormone. In 
various studies BGH has been linked to cancer and is banned by many countries, 
including Canada, New Zealand and the entire European community. Akre and Wilson's 
report said that Monsanto had been accused of fraud in connection with 
information it had provided to the EPA concerning dioxin, published deceitful 
statements about food safety, and funded favorable studies about the product from 
tame scientists. The newscast also reported on allegations that Monsanto had 
attempted to bribe public officials in Canada. 

According to the reporters, WTVT carefully reviewed the team's four-part 
investigation for factual accuracy and heavily advertised the series on radio. It 
planned to release the story during television sweeps week beginning Feb. 24, 
1997. The day before the airing, however, the station yanked the shows after 
Monsanto hired a powerful law firm to complain to Roger Ailes. Wilson and Akre 
testified that the local station manager again reviewed the reports, found no 
errors, and scheduled them to run the following week. The station also offered 
Monsanto an opportunity to appear on the show and respond. Monsanto declined 
the offer and fired off another threatening letter to Ailes. Wilson and Akre 
claim that the station manager, David Boylan, ordered the reporters to edit the 
show in a way that was deceptive but favorable to Monsanto. "For every fact 
we intended to broadcast, we had documentation six weeks from Sunday," Wilson 
told me. "The station's lawyer told us time and again, 'You don't get it. It 
doesn't matter what the facts are. We don't want to be spending money to defend 
a lawsuit.'" According to Wilson, the station was also worried about losing 
advertisers and had received calls from a grocery-chain and dairy-industry 
interests. 

According to their subsequent lawsuit, Boylan threatened to fire Wilson and 
Akre "within 48 hours" if they declined to cooperate in the deception. He 
subsequently softened this position, they testified, offering to lay off both 
reporters with full salaries for their contract period, provided they agreed to 
sign a confidentiality agreement. For nine months they worked on 83 different 
drafts of the story -- none of which satisfied Fox or Monsanto. Akre testified 
that the station had tried to force her to say that the BGH milk was safe and no 
different from non-BGH milk, despite abundant studies that showed otherwise. 
"We told them to go ahead and kill the story," Wilson says, "just don't make 
us lie." Boylan eventually fired the reporters in December 1997, and they sued 
Fox. In August 2000, following a five-month trial, a Florida jury awarded Akre 
$425,000 under Florida's private-sector whistleblower's statute, which 
prohibits retaliation against employees who threaten to disclose employer conduct 
that is "in violation of a law, rule or regulation." The jury found that Akre 
had been fired "because she threatened to disclose to the Federal Communications 
Commission under oath in writing the broadcast of a false, distorted, or 
slanted news report that she reasonably believed would violate the prohibition 
against intentional fabrications or distortions of the news on television." 

But the story does not have an ending that is happy for Akre and Wilson, or 
for American democracy. On Feb. 14, 2003, the Florida District Court of Appeals 
reversed the jury verdict. The bizarre decision adopted Fox's argument that 
the FCC's 50-year-old News Distortion Rule, which prohibits the broadcast of 
false reports, does not qualify as a "law, rule or regulation," as required by 
the whistleblower's statute, since it had been created over the years in 
decisions by FCC judges and never promulgated in a rule-making process. 

    
>From the birth of the broadcasting industry, the airwaves -- from which most 
Americans obtain their news -- were regarded and regulated as a public trust, 
a communal resource like the air and water. The Federal Radio Act of 1927 
required that broadcasters, as a condition of their licenses, operate in the 
"public interest" by covering important policy issues and providing equal time to 
both sides of public questions. Those requirements evolved into the powerful 
Fairness Doctrine, which mandated that the broadcast media has a duty to 
maintain an informed public. Among other things, broadcasters had to air children's 
and community-based programming, and the rules were weighted to encourage 
diversity of ownership and local control. The Fairness Doctrine governed television 
and radio for most of the 20th century. In the 1960s the Federal 
Communications Commission (FCC) and the courts applied the Fairness Doctrine to require 
cigarette manufacturers to include the surgeon general's warnings in their TV 
and radio advertisements, and polluters to notify the public when advertising a 
polluting product. Advertisers of gas-guzzling automobiles, for example, had 
to provide rebuttal time for public interest advocates to debate the impact of 
wasteful fuel consumption on our environment and public health. According to 
media commentator Bill Moyers, "The clear intent was to prevent a monopoly of 
commercial values from overwhelming democratic values -- to assure that the 
official view of reality -- corporate or government -- was not the only view of 
reality that reached the people." The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the 
Fairness Doctrine in the Red Lion case in 1969, confirming that it is "the 
right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is 
paramount."  

Then, in 1988, Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine as a favor to 
the big studio heads that had supported his election. The occasion was a case 
involving a Syracuse, N.Y., television station that had broadcast nine paid 
editorials advocating the construction of a nuclear power plant. When the station 
refused to air opposing viewpoints, an anti-nuke group complained. The three 
Reagan appointees who ran the FCC sided with the TV station, applying the same 
laissez-faire philosophy to the airwaves as the Reagan team did to the other 
parts of the common. They reasoned that the recent proliferation of cable TV 
allays the "Supreme Court's apparent concern that listeners and viewers have 
access to diverse sources of information." Broadcasters would henceforth be under 
no obligation to air views that opposed their own. 
    
Reagan's FCC chairman, Mark Fowler, scoffed at critics' concerns that the 
loss of the nation's most popular open forum diminished our democracy. 
"Television," he said, "is just another appliance -- it's a toaster with pictures." A 
horrified Congress reacted with legislation codifying the Fairness Doctrine, but 
President Reagan vetoed the bills. The FCC's pro-industry, anti-regulatory 
philosophy effectively ended the right of access to broadcast television by any 
but the moneyed interests. 

As an unregulated part of the commons, TV and radio are today subject to the 
same dynamic that is polluting our other public trust assets, with behemoths 
consolidating control of and contaminating the airwaves. 

One-sided and often dishonest broadcasting has replaced the evenhanded 
reporting mandated by the Fairness Doctrine. The right-wing radio conglomerate Clear 
Channel, which in 1995 operated 40 radio stations, today owns over 1,200 
stations and controls 11 percent of the market. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation 
is the largest media conglomerate on the planet, one of seven media giants 
that own or control virtually all of the United States' 2,000 TV stations, 11,000 
radio stations, and 11,000 newspapers and magazines. And, predictably, these 
media corporations have the White House's support. Despite congressional 
mandates for diversity of ownership and local control, the number of corporations 
that control our media is shrinking dramatically. 

This consolidation reduces diversity, gives consumers limited and homogenized 
choices, and erodes local control. Radio stations play the same music, giving 
little opportunity for new or alternative artists. North Dakota farmers can't 
get local emergency broadcasts or crop reports, and New York City residents 
no longer have a country radio station. Corporate consolidation has reduced 
news broadcast quality and has dramatically diminished the inquisitiveness of our 
national press. 

To meet the challenges of the future, the United States needs an open 
marketplace of ideas. As fewer companies own more and more properties, that 
marketplace is withering. TV stations are no longer controlled by people primarily 
engaged in their communities, and news bureaus are no longer run by newspeople. 
Driven solely by the profit motive, many of these companies have liquidated 
their investigative journalism units, documentary teams and foreign bureaus to 
shave expenses. Americans must now tune in to the BBC to get quality foreign 
news. Local news coverage is also shrinking, as owners cut corners by 
consolidating newsrooms. Coverage at the Louisiana Statehouse in Baton Rouge is typical: 
In 1970 there were five investigative reporters assigned to the Capitol beat. 
Today there are none. Not a single reporter from a national news outlet is 
currently assigned to cover the U.S. Department of Interior.     

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