F A I R ' S
8 T H A N N U A L
R E P O R T
How power still shapes the news
Fear & Favor 2007
By Peter Hart & Janine Jackson
U
.S. journalists seeking to fulfill the
profession's traditional goal of telling
the truth and "letting the chips fall
where they may" have powerful
forces to contend with, starting with the
corporate owners who employ them, and
the corporate advertisers who fuel the
enterprise, both of whom have an investment in maintaining a political conversation and climate favorable to their profitability. There are also legislators who
maintain the pro-corporate policy media
owners rely on to thrive, local political
players with axes to grind, and well-funded PR campaigns from all comers. Each
year these renew and refine their efforts to
shape news media coverage—and public
opinion—to suit their interests. Each year
some journalists fight back, and some
don't.
Sacred Heart Medical Center (10/29/07)
whose graphic featured a bandaged index
finger that "poked up" several inches
beyond the ad's margin into the news
columns above. Other incidents seem less
silly and more troubling.
• "It doesn't blur the
line. It obliterates it,"
stated Washington Post
ombud Deborah Howell
(Washington
Post.
In Advertisers We Trust
9/24/07). "If was a sixpage General Motors
advertising supplement
(9/20/07) in the paper
that touted the automaker's environmental credentials. Howell's and many newsroom
staffers' problem: The section was filled
with articles bearing bylines of Post writers, giving the appearance of a partnership
between the paper and a company it covers. Executive editor Leonard Downie Jr.'s
official justification was unsatisfying:
Because the stories bad been previously
published, he told the Post's Howard
Kurtz (9/24/07), "we were not doing journalism specifically for this section." But
his response on the ethics of such editorial/advertising hybrids was priceless: "I'm
not sure where the line is on that, and that's
why I agreed to go this far."
I
• GM"s successful charm offensive
didn't stop with the Washington Post. A
cover story by Mary Connelly in the trade
paper Automotive News (8/6/07)
Eear & Favor is by no means a comprehensive compilation of violations of
journalistic ethics; indeed, most times
people in the news business compromise
their integrity, word never leaves the news
room. But this sampling of what got out
should encourage tiews audiences to
maintain a critical attitude as we read and
watch the news, not oniy about what
might be left out of the story, but about
what's in it—and why.
t's been a while since commercial sponsors were happy with a 30-second spot;
now it's all about more "subtle" forms of
encroachment into programming, the
more unavoidable the better—product
placement, "video news releases"
(VNRs). tie-ins.
Sometimes these compromises seem
simply inane: It's hard to know what the
Eugene. Oregon. Register-Guard was
thinking when they ran an ad for the
20 March / April 2008 • Extra!
described how the company gave radio
talkshow hosts free use of new cars and
trucks in addition to buying ads during
their shows. There's no reason not to draw
a straight line from that to, for example.
Rush Limbaugh's effusion to listeners:
"Believe in General Motors,
folks. They're a classic
American company doing it
all." As consumer advocate
and longtime GM nemesis
Ralph Nader pointed out
(CounterSpin, 8/24/07). it
"would be clearly illegal for
disc jockeys to take freebies
in order to promote certain
songs. . . . I don't see anything different when it comes
to a product, like a GM car."
Sam Mancuso. GM's director of brand
marketing alliances and operations, told
Automotive News the company wooed
hosts (of various ideological stripes,
including liberals Ed Schultz and Whoopi
Goldberg, as well as Limbaugh, Bill
O'Reilly and Sean Hannity) because
"radio personalities have unique relationships with their listeners. They make a real
emotional connection. The audience
knows they are being genuine."
• Glenn Beck hasn't done much for
CNN Headline News" ratings, but he did
snag the cable channel one first in 2007:
In June and July. Beck delivered the channel's first ever on-air plugs for a sponsor.
Select Comfort mattresses. A CNN
spokesperson told Hollywood Reporter
(7/20/07), "Select Comfort is Glenn
Beck's/Headline News" first and only
advertiser to have an on-air entitlement,
and it's specifically targeted for his show."
But the PR flak went on to suggest that
they hoped to fix that, saying that
Headline News will "evaluate advertiser
interest" in similar deals for Beck's show,
as well as for others, including Nancy
Grace and Showbiz Tonight.
• Somehow, ever since Providence
Health Systems began sponsoring a weekly medical report during newscasts on
KOIN-TV
in
Portland.
Oregon.
Providence spokespeople seem to keep
showing up in those reports. In one segment, according to OPB News (6/25/07).
an informational phone number given out
al the end of a story on inner ear disorders
turned out to be for Providence. Likewise,
a segment on Montessori schools featured
one operated by Providence. At the time of
OPB News' story, each of the station's
previous 14 health reports had featured at
least one Providence source.
KOIN news director Jeff Alan
declared: "These are not advertisements
whatsoever. These are reports." He admitted that the sponsor's experts were likely
to be featured, because "they're looking to
be available." but he claimed that "if other
hospitals and other people were more
available to us, yeah, they would be in the
reports." However, according to OPB
News' investigation, the station "does not
appear to have trouble finding nonProvidence medical experts for health
reports that air at times when Providence
is not a sponsor."
• News director Greg Caputo of WGNChannel 9 in Chicago didn't see what the
fuss was about. "We're not going to be
promoting the Bureau of Tourism, for
God's sake," Caputo exclaimed (Chicago
Sun-Times, 3/23/07). Caputo was
responding to concerns about two-minute
segments the station planned to air April
through July, sponsored by the state
tourism bureau. WGN would retain "total
editorial control" over the segments about
travel in and around the state, Alan argued,
though the sponsoring agency wouldn't be
shut out: "We may ask them for some of
their ideas." No word on whether that's the
relationship the news department usually
maintains with advertisers.
• Amanda Congdon may
have had a modern job title—
she was a "videoblogger" for
ABC News—but she has an oldfashioned conflict of interest.
According to Ad Age (3/19/07),
she had a sideline hosting a
series of what she called
"infotainmercials" for the
website of the chemical
company DuPont. As Radar magazine put it (RadarOnline.com.
3/20/07), the deal "naturally raises
questions about how aggressively the
network covers DuPont's role in,
say, building up Iraq's nuclear program
or its part in giving thousands of people
cancer."
But it wasn't a problem for ABC
News; network spokesperson Jeffrey
Schneider told Radar that Congdon was
"a unique contributor who had deals prior
to working for ABC, and continues to do
so"—though Congdon's videoblog segments were also featured on ABC's 24hour digital news channel. ABC News
Now, and her segments were co-produced,
at least according to her, by an ABC News
senior producer.
• When the Philadelphia Inquirer
was sold in 2006, some readers may have
hoped the paper would bring in some new
voices. They probably didn't imagine that
one of those new "voices" would be a
hank. In what their own staff writer called
an "unusual arrangement" (4/14/07). the
Inquirer began running a column paid for
hy Citizens Bank in 2007. The column,
which focuses on news about local businesses, carries a Citizens Bank label and is
boxed in green—that's "Citizens Bank's
color," the paper informed readers (in a
story whose main subject was the paper's
decision to start running ads on page one,
"once considered the sacred province of
news").
• CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo
seemed to be a walking conflict of interest
in 2007. In January, details of her close
relationship with top Citigroup officer
Todd Thomson were revealed (Wall
Street Journal, 1/24/07). Citigroup is a
major CNBC advertiser, as well as the
subject of reporting on any financial news
network. Thomson often
brought
Bartiromo to company functions and
meetings with clients, in
one case flying her to
private Citigroup luncheons in Hong Kong
and Shanghai.
The conflict seems
obvious, but CNBC
defended
their
star
anchor, even chalking
the engagements up to
"source development"
(Wall Street Journal. 1/26/07). One
anonymous CNBC source told the
Washington Post (1/26/07): "I don't
think there's even the appearance of a conflict of interest.... We paid our way. This
is what we cover. This is what we do."
New York Times columnist David
Carr had a different take (1/29/07), pointing to "an implicit contract at play here.
By making huge advertising buys on
CNBC, Citigroup obtained access to its
biggest star. Clearly, an exchange of
brands was under way." Added Carr:
"CNBC has positioned itself as an adjunct
to business, the glowing friend in the corner with the sound off and a ticker at the
bottom. . . . It is companion media rather
than the source of oversight or rigorous
coverage."
The Boss's Business(es)
F
or some, the Wall Street Journal's
failure to break the story of its own parent company's imminent purchase by
Rupert Murdoch (CNBC—5/1/07—was
first with the story of Murdoch's ultimately successful bid for Dow Jones) was the
perfect example of corporate media outlets' inability to report on themselves.
Slate's Michelle Tsai (7/10/07) cited selfcensorship on matters ot their boss's business as an all-too-common media reality.
"35 percent of respondents [to a journalists' survey] said journalists they knew
often or sometimes avoided stories that
would hurt the financial interests of their
employers." The flip side, of course, is all
those stories they actually do that serve
those financial interests, which become
more various all the time.
Extral « March / April 2008 21
S peria I
"Shows the absolutely critical importance
of the independent media." —Howard Zinn
THRUIOI WiwN's ETLS
INDEPENDENf
INTERVENTION
Independent Intervention is an award-winning documentary about United States
media coverage of the conflict in Iraq.
Focusing on the human costs of war, it contrasts corporate-controlled media coverage
of the invasion of Iraq with independent
media reports of the brutal realities on the
ground.
—With media experts including Amy
Goodman, Noam Chomsky, Oahr Jamaii,
Danny Schechter, David Barsamian, Kalle
Lasn, Norman Solomon, and James Zogby.
DVD, 75 minutes
Buy this for a special price of $20 and
you'll receive a copy of Outfoxed: Rupert
Murdoch's War on Journalism as a bonus.
This DVD exposes the truth behind Rupert
Murdoch's self-styled "fair and balanced"
Fox News Channel.
—With Fox employees and media experts
Walter Cronkite, Jeff Cohen, Peter Hart, and
Bob McChesney, Outfoxed details Fox's
systemic conservative bias.
FAIR Sales, 112 W. 27th St.,
New York, NY 10001
fair.org
22 March / April 2008 •
Extra!
• It seems the biggest sacred cow of the
press really is the press itself, even if the
press is just a giveaway subway tabloid
like Metro. New York magazine reported
(8/13/07) that Metro humor columnist
(and Daily Show producer) Elliott Kalan
had been summarily dropped from the
paper after a column in which he declared:
"Nobody reads newspapers anymore. As
this very copy of Metro shows, the only
way to get people to read a newspaper is
to literally force it into their hands."
A Metro staffer told New York that
Kalan's column was seen by the interim
CEO of the Stockholm-based Metro
International, in New York on business,
who told the paper's New York publisher
to fire the columnist immediately; Kalan
was told the next week his column was
finished. Says Kalan, "My assumption is
the wrong person saw it and didn't get the
joke."
And they know funny, those Metro
execs. The global newspaper chain is
notorious for in-house "humor," like that
of leading North American executive
Steve Nylundh, who opened a 2003
speech to a group of top representatives:
"There were two niggers standing by a
pool, and they took their dicks out"
(AlterNet, 1/10/05).
• The worst examples of conflict of
interest are when the public has no way of knowing
of a behind-the-scenes
link between the content
of a news story and some
other entity. But sometimes disclosure just
doesn't seem like enough.
When NBC's Today show
launched its "Where In
the World Is
Matt Lauer?"
feature by having Lauer "earn
his wings" at
the Boeing factory in Everett.
Washington (4/30/07). the show's
acknowledgement of their corporate closeness to the matter consisted of Lauer, after
telling viewers he was "standing right now
inside one of the engines of a 777," continuing: "Full disclosure, it's actually made
by our parent company. General Electric.
One hundred fifteen thousand pounds of
thrust."
But that disclosure seemed more like a
plug when it was followed by Lauer's
assurances that "these planes will make
flying more comfortable" and that "you
don't have to be nervous on a plane like
this, because they have put these things
through rigorous and extensive testing."
Another correspondent declared that new
Boeing planes "will actually not only
deliver passengers a better ride, but also
cost savings for airlines," while a third
reporter described Boeing as "a single
company contributing an awful lot to the
U.S. bottom line." By the time Lauer
thanked Boeing employees "who love
what they do and make a great product,"
and signed off with "a saying around here
. . . 'If it ain't Boeing, we ain't going,'"
viewers may have felt that no amount of
disclosure could have been sufficient.
• Timing is everything. Had ABC's
news division decided to devote five hours
in the heart of primetime to NASCAR in
2006, that might've been one thing. But
the fact that the network launched the fivepart documentary series NASCAR in
Primetime in August 2007, just weeks after
ABC corporate cousins ABC Sports and
ESPN began a $560 million-a-year contract to carry the sport, made it seem like
another thing altogether. A New York
Times reviewer (8/15/07) found the series
offered "nothing new
about NASCAR" —but
it seemed newsworthy
enough to Good Moming America (also in
ABC's news division),
which aired a segment
the day of the first
installment (8/15/07)
that concluded with
reporter Chris Cuomo
telling viewers to
"make sure to watch
it."
NBC
• The Catholic
Church shouldn't be
in the business of fibbing, but that's what
some suspected when the Brownsville,
Texas PBS affiliate KMBH, owned by the
Roman Catholic Diocese of Brownsville,
claimed that they didn't air the Frontline
documentary Hand of God because PBS
failed to provide the video feed in time
(Valley Morning Star, 1/18/07). Critics
suspected the station's actual reason had
to do with the documentary's subject matter; Catholic priest molestation scandals.
The station re-aired a program about tbe
Taliban instead.
to help tell tbe story. Now, how is that
for a high-minded excuse for being
here?
Not great.
• It's by now an open joke tbat the
Super Bowl will have urgent "news value"
to the news division of whatever network
is sponsoring it that year. Too bad the
joke's on the public, who are poorly
served by such open acceptance of nonjournalistic priorities. In 2007, CBS's supposedly austere Sunday political talkshow
Face the Nation signed on as just another
part of wbat one paper rightly termed
"today's NFL infomercial" (Newport
News, Va. Daily Press, 2/4/07). Host Bob
Scbieffer.
broadcasting
from
the
Indianapolis Colts cheerleader dressing
room, made bardly a pretense of journalistic justification:
We usually concentrate on the news
we believe you need to know. The
Super Bowl, on the otber hand, is big
news tbat millions upon millions of
Americans want to know. Since
someone had to do it, we volunteered
• The network tie-in is no longer limited to "light" morning show segments. Call
it rooting for the home team, but one has
to ask what stories are being squeezed out
as chunks of the newscast are devoted to
in-house cheerleading. Several writers on
ABC's Good Morning America.
responding anonymously to a 2007
Writers Guild of America. East survey
(1/01), reported that "any domestic story
without a crime component is expected to
find a way to use a clip from the popular
ABC television series Desperate
Housewives." Joumali'^is ;it WABC-TV
Q D C Ktart here
IIOUSEAMAES
FAIR'S radio program is aired on more
than 150 stations. CounlerSpin features
the same hard-hitting media criticism as
Extra! each and every week.
• Max Brantley on Mike Huckabee,
Marc Herotd on Afghanistan
• Asii Bali on NIE. Mark Weisbrot
on Venezuela referendum
• Glenn Greenwald on Joe Klein,
Dave Tomlin on Biial Hussein
• Norman Solomon on 'Made Love,
Got War'
• The WGA-E survey also found
accounts of parent company tie-ins at
CBS. where respondents "took particular
exception to the requirement that they regularly write interviews with the previous
night's Survivor or Amazing Race loser,
stories about the 'real-life missing person'
featured on that Sunday's episode of
Without a TVace. and numerous feature
stories incorporating syndicated daytime
talkshow host Dr. Phil."
• Buried in the Bitter Waters: The
Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in
America, a 2007 book by Cox
Newspapers reporter Elliot Jaspin,
expanded on "Leave or Die," Jaspin's
remarkable 2006 series on racial cleansing
TVuth in Advertising
'a Business Disaster'
Recently on
CounterSpin
in New York noted the station had "reported" on magician David Blaine's
Manhattan underwater-living stunt each of
eight nights leading up to an ABC primetime special in which he re-surfaced. ABC
Network Radio staffers were "instructed
to write about" betting on the National
Spelling Bee, coincidentally airing on
ABC that week.
M
ost "fear and favor" shown by media outlets takes the form of slanted or incomplete
news coverage. But media companies' zeal to please the advertisers, who are, after all,
their main client, goes beyond covering nevifs to making it.
In 2007, congressional debate on a big Food and Drug Administration bill touched on
pharmaceutical ads, a fast-growing source of media revenue. As recommended by the
National Academy of Sciences, an early draft of the bill would have given the FDA the power
to impose a moratorium on consumer advertising for a drug that had serious safety concerns. That provision was dropped from the final bill, reported the Wall Street Journal
(9/21/07)—not so much due to drug companies' efforts, but to those of media lobbying
groups like the National Association of
Broadcasters, who "swung into action," sensing
regulation of drug ads to be "a business disaster
in the making."
The lobby solicited testimony from legal
scholars and others stating that the moratorium
would violate the First Amendment and restrict
the public's "right to know." As the Journal reported:
NAB
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF 8BOADCASTEHS
• Robert Parry on 'Why We Write,'
Karlos Schmieder on gentrification
• Shahid Buttar on Pakistan.
Jonathan Tasini on the writers strike
The messages were conveyed through a campaign of visits, letters and calls to key lawmakers from advertising firms and broadcasters, as well as other media companies. Many members of Congress heard from media interests in their home districts, according to lobbyists
and congressional staffers.
To listen online, go to fair.org.
To check for stations In your
area, please see page 31.
This is not an effort the NAB has made with regard to, say, Pentagon restrictions on
reporters covering Guantdnamo.—PW. & J.J.
Extral • March/Apnl 2008 23
'We Do Not Want Reform'
"0
bviousiy, the primaries have been moved up, so February 5 becomes a very,
I very important date and as a result we're getting money in November,
December, certainly in January, money that we wouidn't have seen tili iater on.
And we're seeing a very robust amount of money being spent. We iike the fact that there
are a number of candidates. We like the fact that there's a number of candidates wWh a lot
of money behind them. We do not want political reform,"
—CBS president Leslie Moonves in December 2007, iaughingiy expiaining the relationship between an important source of his networi
Purchase answer to see full
attachment