by Nimish Desai
Daily Texan
U-Wire
The mainstream news media in the United States have been the object of many accusations of bias. Many people, citing what they see as the news media's acquiescent to supportive stance on pressing social issues such as abortion, claim that the media have moved to the left.
Other groups, noting for example that a majority of newspapers supported
George W. Bush for president, claim the news media endorse a position far to the right.
We can take a look at a few representative examples of the many issues the news media have distorted, and from them gain some true perspective on the bias that has persisted for too long now. In 1996, Congress passed one of the most far-reaching pieces of legislation in recent times, called the Telecommunications Act. Among other provisions, the act provided a loophole that allowed the otherwise illegal Westinghouse buyout of CBS, and it handed over the rights to our country's digital technology infrastructure to communications giants without providing for free airtime for candidates during election years and other issues of public interest.
Given the weight of this legislation, one would expect that the news media would be vigilant in covering its implications. Instead, coverage was limited mostly to the subsection that dealt with the infamous V-chip. To understand how this could pass as journalism, we need only consider the source.
Some of the biggest beneficiaries of the act were the media companies and the giant corporations that wished to purchase them - Westinghouse (CBS), General Electric (NBC), Disney (ABC) and what would soon become AOL TimeWarner (CNN, Time Magazine) - and they weren't likely to blow their own cover by letting journalists spend too much time discussing the many downsides of the act. This is important to realize; the owners of these news media outlets will not usually permit coverage that may sour a business deal. Another such example is GE's successful attempts at stifling NBC reporters who sought to investigate the nuclear power and weapons industry, in which GE plays a substantial role.
A second point is that the news media, like most institutions, are not likely to bite the hand that feeds them. The vast majority of print journalism's profits, and the entirety of radio's and television's profits, come from advertisements. A disturbing conflict of interest is introduced when journalists attempt to investigate their shows' or papers' prominent advertisers.
In 2000, Time magazine published its "Heroes for the Planet" series, which spotlighted individuals helping to improve environmental conditions around the world. Surprisingly, the auto industry's striking contribution to pollution problems was almost uniformly neglected. Surprising, that is, only until one learns that the entire series was sponsored by Ford Motor Company.
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Pharmaceutical companies are also big-time advertisers on television, and they were able to count on virtual silence from news programs when they, with the help of Al Gore, prevented AIDS-ravished South Africa from obtaining generic HIV medication from India in 1998. Though despicable, the merits of their actions are beside the point here. What is worrisome is that those with sufficient resources were able to buy acquiescence from those who many trust to give an accurate picture of our world.
A third trend, which is really an outgrowth of the previous two, is the mainstream media's timidity in scrutinizing our government. For example, it is shameful that the public still has not been allowed to see the White House documents that would provide important insights into what its relationship with Enron was prior to its implosion. This information is vital to our understanding of what role the government might have played in our deepening corporate accounting scandals.
It is information that responsible news outlets would be adamant in obtaining, and the half-hearted attempts by the mainstream media to do so are revealing. Indeed, one would expect that as the government becomes more close-knit with the super rich of the world, the corporation-owned media will stand by quietly as this new state-corporate nexus does as it pleases.
This sort of bias, the sort that has its roots not in the increasingly phony left-right spectrum of American politics, but in the increasingly dramatic rich-poor dichotomy of our country, has become the norm in our mainstream media. The implications are clear - moneyed interests have the ability to filter and rearrange the news in any manner they see fit, leaving them in a better position to further consolidate their wealth, while leaving the rest of us wondering what is true.
So while one should certainly be wary of anything that appears to one as bias, whether it be about abortion or Republicans, there is growing reason to believe that a graver problem lies in the corporate bias imposed on our media. Business interests do not speak in terms of left and right - they speak in terms of profits. If that means dissolving our borders in a way that angers U.S. conservatives, then so be it; or if it means crippling labor unions in a way that angers U.S. liberals, then so be it also. Just don't expect them to tell you the nature of what they are doing through the newspapers and television stations they own.
