FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
In a major relaxation of broadcast ownership rules, the Federal Communications Commission has announced it will allow networks to own two TV stations in the same city. Previously, the FCC limited a network or other company to one television station per city. Under the new regulations announced August 5, a company can own two television […]
A new study of news and public affairs programming on PBS stations has found that the voice of business is much louder than all others — a troubling finding for a broadcast system established to “provide a voice for groups that may otherwise be unheard.” Four years after Congressional leaders failed to “zero out” public […]
Introduction Public television has survived. The high profile assault from conservative critics, which was front-page news in the early 1990s, now seems like ancient history. As we enter the digital television age, we no longer hear Congressional threats to “zero out” public television, plans to “privatize” public broadcasting have receded from the opinion pages, and […]
Concerned about the high cost of college? Many people are, but your hard-earned dollars are hardly lining the pockets of history department faculty. What your tuition dollars are doing is fueling the profits of a few multinational media conglomerates that publish journals like Brain Research or Tetrahedron. Brain Research, a publication from Elsevier Science (owned […]
FAIR’s October 16 Action Alert criticized mainstream media silence following the October 8th release of a second CIA report detailing the agency’s knowledge of Contra drug trafficking. Activists were encouraged to write directly to journalists at the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times to inquire about each paper’s treatment of the new […]
The day after voters in King County, Washington, had apparently approved a plan to hike the local sales tax by a tenth of a percent to fund a new ballpark for the Seattle Mariners baseball team (9/20/95), the Seattle Times got right to the point with its banner headline: “Stadium Leads by 4,000 Votes.” A […]
Steve Wilson and Jane Akre, a husband-and-wife investigative reporting team at WTVT, Fox‘s Tampa Bay affiliate, thought they had a dynamite story: Despite promises to consumers, supermarkets in Florida were selling milk produced with rBGH, a synthetic growth hormone developed by Monsanto that boosts milk production. The use of rBGH causes udder infections in cows, […]
Last fall, when News Corporation owner Rupert Murdoch joined the board of directors at the Cato Institute, the announcement went unreported in major media. Perhaps it seemed routine for one of the world’s most powerful media moguls to take a leadership post at one of the most influential think tanks in Washington. At future meetings, […]
(From “The Global Media Giants,” by Robert W. McChesney, Extra!, November/December 1997) $10 billion – 1996 sales The News Corporation is often identified with its head, Rupert Murdoch, whose family controls some 30 percent of its stock. Murdoch’s goal is for News Corporation to own multiple forms of programming–news, sports, films and children’s shows–and beam […]
(From “The Global Media Giants,” by Robert W. McChesney, Extra!, November/December 1997) $25 billion – 1997 sales Time Warner, the largest media corporation in the world, was formed in 1989 through the merger of Time Inc. and Warner Communications. In 1992, Time Warner split off its entertainment group, and sold 25 percent of it to […]
A specter now haunts the world: a global commercial media system dominated by a small number of superpowerful, mostly U.S.-based transnational media corporations. It is a system that works to advance the cause of the global market and promote commercial values, while denigrating journalism and culture not conducive to the immediate bottom line or […]
(From “The Global Media Giants,” by Robert W. McChesney, Extra!, November/December 1997) $24 billion – 1997 sales Disney is the closest challenger to Time Warner for the status of world’s largest media firm. In the early 1990s, Disney successfully shifted its emphasis from its theme parks and resorts to its film and television divisions. In […]
(From “The Global Media Giants,” by Robert W. McChesney, Extra!, November/December 1997) $5 billion – 1996 sales General Electric is one of the leading electronics and manufacturing firms in the world with nearly $80 billion in sales in 1996. Its operations have become increasingly global, with non-U.S. revenues increasing from 20 percent of the total […]
The benefits of the North American Free Trade Agreement were obvious to mainstream U.S. media back in 1992-93. The New York Times (7/21/92) said NAFTA promised “jobs, wealth and economic activity throughout the continent.” The Washington Post declared (9/14/93) that “the list of new opportunities and advantages is a long one,” while insisting (5/11/93) that […]
Sixty years ago, reporter and press critic George Seldes wrote in Freedom of the Press that advertisers, not government, are the principal news censors in the United States. Not only do advertisers pressure newspapers to kill or alter stories, he concluded, but newspapers censor stories out of deference “toward the sources of their money” without […]
When two of the world’s most powerful media outlets fight, who do you root for? Are you cheering for Time Warner, the $7 billion-a-year conglomerate, which provides monopoly cable service to 40 percent of the U.S.—and which has used this position to block competitors to CNN, which Time Warner long had a large investment in, […]
There’s a new player among the global media moguls, and his name is Conrad Black. His company, Hollinger Inc., is now the third largest newspaper chain in the Western world, after Gannett and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (New York Times, 6/24/96), with a combined circulation exceeding 10 million (James Winter, Democracy’s Oxygen). Black owns 650 […]
Patrick Buchanan’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination presented the establishment media with a dilemma: How do you present someone as an extremist when you’ve employed him as an opinion-shaper for many years? The need for most media to label Buchanan as out of the mainstream may not stem from his well-documented record of bigotry […]
The change is subtle, and misleading by design, but the Internet is in full transition from a participatory interactive communications network to a broadcast medium dominated by electronic commerce. The transition is occurring under the guise of making the technically daunting Internet cheaper and easier to use. At first glance, this new promise by corporate […]
The AFL-CIO’s first contested presidential election in 40 years gave the labor movement a brief moment in the media spotlight in October. Although TV news largely ignored the story (on the night of the election, ABC‘s Nightline was devoted to the new baseball season), daily newspapers that rarely focus on labor ran front-page articles on […]
