Now for some specifics about what makes the news.

The language of communications scholars is full of terms like "agenda-setting" and "gatekeepers" and so on, which are used to deconstruct how the news is put together. Bypassing all the fancy terms, let's lay out some of the basic principles at work. To begin, we have to start with an idea that may seem obvious but really isn't: the news follows, not leads.

The evening news is almost always in the past tense. People watch the news to see "what happened today." Generally the only portion of the news which speaks of the future is the weather forecast (insert a joke of your choice about the uselessness of weather forecasts here). To put it another way, the news doesn't determine what will happen, it only reports on what did happen. Granted, this is an oversimplification of the situation, but it is important in this instance to think about the news as mostly a reaction.

Every day, news editors at television networks and newspapers know they need to fill a certain amount of space, either pages or minutes, with stories. Obviously, there is always an unpredictable element; some kind of accident or disaster or very rarely something positive can happen and make the news chief have to reorganize the broadcast or the front page to accommodate the new information. However, at 11am, the editor doesn't know what big story might break in the next six hours.

For this reason, news organizations rely on predictable events to fill pages. Editors count on things they know are going to happen beforehand to guarantee a certain number of stories - which can always be bumped if need be. Pre-planned events, such as openings, press conferences, public appearances all fall into this category. Unsurprisingly, the biggest supplier of this type of event is the government.

From federal to the most local level, news and government exist in symbiosis. Government lives on public relations moments. When a crisis occurs, be it a national power outage or a local crime, news reporters seek out government representatives (either elected officials or law enforcement, preferably both) for primary information. The two are intertwined to an astonishing degree, all the way up to the national news outlets.

Because news outlets need government sources to survive, a canny government official who is a good source has a fantastic bargaining position. A reporter needs a quote from the official for a story; the official can dangle that quote like a carrot and use it to his (or her) advantage. Reporters need to have access to government personnel to do their jobs.

Herein lies the problem.

Presidential administrations know that reporters covering politics and Washington for the major news outlets need to have access to the administration's officials in order to produce stories. The reporters' needs can and have been used as a bargaining chip. A reporter who publishes a story unfavorable to the administration can have their privileges revoked, which could lead to being fired, because a political reporter without any sources is useless. This has happened in the past and been documented in pretty much every White House administration.

Applying this kind of intimidation on a grand scale might account for the silence of the American news media in the past two years. If, instead of threatening to cut off just a single reporter, the administration has threatened to cut off access for an entire network or newspaper, the result would be that every major news outlet is trapped. If one of them breaks out and publishes something unfavorable and loses access, all the other networks still have the sources and therefore the stories. Ratings will go down, which means revenues will go down, and the CEOs of the multinational corporations which own the news divisions will be very unhappy. Only a very big story, one that could not be ignored, could tempt any major news organization to dare the wrath of the administration and forge ahead.

Let's not forget those half dozen old white men either. These are powerful, wealthy men who have extensive contacts, in some cases with high ranking members of the Bush administration. Just as the idea of public service went out the window with the corporate take over of news, the idea of journalistic objectivity has been tossed aside as well, because no network news organization wants to break a damaging story about the company that owns the network and signs the paychecks. Bias exists in many ways, and can work just as effectively through what's not talked about, which is why the silence of the American press regarding the vast amount of wrongdoing by the Bush administration is a serious problem that needs to be addressed.

So, American national news organizations are caught in the grip of two powerful forces. Their own CEOs and bosses want them to keep making money and not rock the boat and disturb the profitability of the company. Political power brokers don't want to look bad and will use any means at their disposal to prevent the news media from hammering them. The press, then, is being pressured on two sides from reporting the truth.

We no longer have a free press in the United States. It is a corporate press which serves particular interests of a small group of people within narrow confines of what is acceptable. The free press is supposed to serve the public, but no organization which is being pressured by both its owners and the government can be considered free.

The silence of the national news media in the face of the multitude of major scandals which have surfaced for the Bush administration suggests that forces are at work behind the scenes which are curtailing the reporting of unfavorable subjects. Of course, until someone within the press corps comes out and gives evidence, this is theoretical speculation. For now.

Is there any hope in this situation? Well, the good news is the uniformity of coverage seems to be fracturing. The war, the leaks regarding the CIA, and any number of other negative events have occurred without completely breaking the silence, but the media shield surrounding the President is noticeably cracked these days. When Newsweek's cover story is "Bush's $87 Million Mess," obviously the knot has slipped and some pigeons are getting loose. Certain stories are too big to ignore, and the news outlets are responding to changes in public sentiment (expressed, no doubt by ratings) to cover the more negative aspects of the Bush presidency. Once again, the news is following where people are going, not leading them anywhere. All it took was time and pressure building before what was going on became too big to be hidden.

This is all well and good for the near future, but a real solution to the corporatization of the media will take a lot more than a few scandals to correct. The underlying problems of media ownership and emphasis on profit margins in reporting the news are serious issues that are part of the larger questions of globalization and the development of a corporate world which Americans need to start considering.

DarkLady
~ November 3, 2003
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