News Corp Supplies Information, Defies Accountability

WHO IS THIS GIT?

If you can't place the face of the shar pei in the photo above, you're not alone. His is not exactly a household name, but it should be. Just as most Americans don't realize that we get almost ALL of our news and information from a grand total of only six companies, most of us don't know who runs those companies, or realize how much their personal, private interests influence our world view. 

So allow me to introduce you to one Rupert Murdoch, octogenarian and media mogul extraordinaire. Murdoch is the Chairman and CEO of News Corporation, a.k.a. News Corp, and he's on our radar this week because one of his British companies, the tabloid paper News of the World, has just been caught hacking into thousands of voicemail accounts in pursuit of tabloid fodder. Had they stuck simply to the voicemails of celebrities, the scandal would likely not have reached across a desk, let alone the pond. But News of the World employees crossed a line of social acceptability when they reportedly also hacked the accounts of high profile crime victims, including the families of victims of terrorist attacks, even going so far as to delete messages that could arguably have affected the outcome of criminal trials.

WHAT DOES THE MEDIA DO WHEN THE MEDIA IS THE NEWS?

The story would be scandalous enough on its own, but taking into account News Corp's massive influence on the media, the repercussions are somewhat overwhelming. To give you an idea of Murdoch's scope of influence, News Corp is the parent company of all FOX tv stations (including FOX News), 20th Century FOX Studios, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, TV Guide, Harper Collins Publishers, and MySpace...just to name a few. You can see a list of News Corp's holdings here.

This one man's decisions reach into pretty much every household in the U.S., not to mention the rest of the world, so how he runs his ship is a matter of some importance. Which might lead one to wonder why his is not a household name. The answer, of course, is that when you run one of the six major media conglomerates, you get to decide exactly how much you want, or don't want, your name to appear in the news. But a scandal of this size is hard to squelch, even if you own the companies reporting on it.

Murdoch, of course, has responded by insisting that the hacking was the result of a few rogue reporters, and has refused to criticize or condemn, let alone fire, News Of The World editor Rebekah Brooks.

The move highlights a tendency of the media mogul to protect his own, industry watchers say....

"He will reward loyalty with loyalty," said Steven Barnett... "It's a case of being one of us."

"If she has 100 percent backing from Rupert Murdoch, which is the word coming out of News Corp, then clearly she is untouchable and more importantly it shows that Murdoch himself thinks the company is untouchable," he adds.

Murdoch has long been criticized by insiders for mixing business with both family and politics, and Brooks is a longtime friend of British Prime Minister David Cameron, whose campaign can credit support in Murdoch's press for much of its success. And though his son and presumed heir James Murdoch has announced the closing of News Of The World, much speculation remains that the end of one Murdoch tabloid is simply the beginning of another. 

Shutting News of the World looks like such a grand gesture. In fact, it's another attempt to look like something is being done -- while in fact changing nothing fundamental within News International.

Shutting the 168-year-old paper isn't a great sacrifice (although, since it was Murdoch's first UK paper, he may feel sentimental about it); it's just bowing to the inevitable. No one wanted to advertise, no one wanted to buy and precious few people wanted to appear in the paper: better to shoot it and put it out of its misery.

But the fact that the URLs for SunonSunday.com and SunonSunday.co.uk were reserved fully two days ago suggests that News International may just be planning to switch its employees over to a "new" paper just like the "old" paper -- but with a new name. This rebranding will fool no one. The fact that the teams are still headed by Rebekah Brooks means nothing will have changed....

Indeed, this smacks of the old tactic of one business committing fraud, declaring bankruptcy, and closing - only to re-open under a new name with a free pass to continue the same old business model. This may be a tried and true business tactic, but it leaves one to wonder, should Murdoch's companies really be trusted as the primary source of so very much of our information?

UPDATES: 

7/11/2011:  Melissa Bell of the Washington Post updates us on the rumors surrounding the scandal, including reports that journalists hacked the voicemails of 9/11 victims as well as the Prime Minister.

7/12/2011: Jonathan Schell provides an in-depth analysis of the scandal and its implications, both social and political, via CNN:

The Murdochs call News Corporation a journalistic enterprise. In fact, it is, first, an entertainment company, with the bulk of its revenue coming from its film and television holdings. Second, and more importantly, it is a propaganda machine for right-wing causes and political figures.

 7/13/11: The FBI has reportedly opened an investigation into News Corp in response to employees allegedly hacking into the voicemail accounts of 9/11 victims. 

7/17/11: Despite efforts to stem backlash from the scandal by resigning her position with News Corp, former NOTW editor Rebekah Brooks has now been arrested and is being held on charges related to corruption and conspiracy to intercept communications.

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What The Colbert Super PAC Means To You

Special Interests -WE HATES THEM 

PACS AND SPECIAL INTERESTS 

In a country split politically down the middle there is one thing nearly everyone can agree on; special interests are ruining American government. We may not all agree on exactly what constitutes a "special" interest, but most of us are savvy enough to know that they exist, that they wield political power, and that they don't represent the needs or opinions of the general public.

In American government today, there is only one surefire way to increase political power - spend money. A LOT of money. Special interests (at least the ones we should be concerned about) know this, and they use it to their absolute advantage. They are experts at two things: fundraising and lobbying. They know how to get their hands on money, and they use their considerable financial resources to throw their political weight around in order to influence politicians to establish policies that favor them. The result is the passing of laws that place the desires of a few over the needs of the many.

This is what campaign finance reform is all about. The campaign finance reform movement in America is generally motivated by an attempt to limit the political influence of special interest groups on public elections and public policy. Campaign finance reform uses two primary methods to accomplish this; (1) by limiting the amount of money that individuals and groups can donate to a particular campaign, and (2) by requiring political campaigns to disclose exactly who has donated how much money to them, making that information available to the public. So theoretically, voters can access that information to determine the degree to which a particular political act or candidate has been motivated or supported by special interests.

LIMITING AND DISCLOSING SPECIAL INTEREST MONEY... 

Special interests, of course, are not big fans of campaign finance reform. It is their primary goal in life to find loopholes, ways to contribute massive amounts of money to individual campaigns in order to influence the outcomes of those campaigns. One of the ways they do this is by forming Political Action Committees, or PACs. A PAC is private group of persons, organizations, and/or corporations that work together to influence the outcome of elections. So when you see the word "PAC" in relation to elections, you should think "special interest money." (We have it on good authority that Pac Man is something completely different, so we apologize to those of you who accidentally ended up here because you were procrastinating by googling retro video games.)

The rules for PACs are different from the rules for individuals. An individual may contribute a maximum of only $1000 to a particular campaign. So in order to contribute more, special interest groups form PACs. Technically, any group that either receives contributions or spends over the amount of $1000 in order to influence the result of a federal election is considered a PAC. 

In order to understand what's going on with campaign finance right now, we need a little history on the regulation of PACs. Under the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002 (a.k.a. the McCain-Feingold Act):

• The cap on the amount of money any PAC may contribute to any campaign per year was set at $5000.
• The cap on the amount of money any PAC may contribute to any political party was set at $15,000.
• The cap on the amount of money any PAC may contribute to another PAC was set at $5000.
• PACs were required to report all of their financial activities, including donations to specific campaigns, to the Federal Election Committee (FEC), which makes those reports available to the public.
• PACs could spend an unlimited amount of money on "independent expenditures" (think campaign commercials) as long as they did not coordinate the activities of those expenditures directly with the candidate's official campaign (which is why candidates add that annoying "I am ___ and I approved this message" to ads that originate within their own official campaigns)...
• ...However, those "independent expenditures" could only be funded by contributions made to that PAC, which were both limited and reported to the FCC as described above. 

 ...UNTIL NOW 

So those were the rules under which PACs operated...until 2010. Then along came Citizens United v. the FEC in which the Supreme Court voted 5-4 (as divisive as a ruling can be) that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts could not be limited, seeing it as an issue protected under First Amendment freedom of speech.

In theory, that all sounds great. In reality, the bottom dropped out of any effort to limit the political influence of PACs, and therefore of special interests. Several things changed as a result of the Citizens United ruling. Remember those "independent expenditures" that used to be both limited and publicly reported? Well, not any more. Corporations can now pay directly for those activities from their own treasuries, and there's no limit to how much money they can spend doing it. This was the birth of the "super PAC." Super PACs are officially known as "independent-expenditure only committees." They can raise unlimited sums of money from virtually anyone - corporations, organizations, unions, even wealthy individuals. Remember those 6 companies that run pretty much everything? Well, there's no longer any limit to how much money they can throw behind a particular campaign. But at least we the public know who's behind that money...right?

Wrong. Special interests are the kings of loopholes, and their super PACs have found themselves a doozy. Under federal law, non-profit corporations are not required to report the sources of their donations to the super PACs. So let's say you're a big corporation and you want to get one of your board members elected to congress. How do you fund his campaign? Easy. You establish a non-profit corporation (all you have to do is file a few papers with the court), you "donate" a colossal amount of your company's money to that non-profit, and the non-profit turns around and donates all of that money to a super Pac. Quick, easy, anonymous, and best (or worst) of all, anyone can do it. Just ask Stephen Colbert.

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Comcast: Censoring Tweets But Spporting Free Press?

Our readers may recall last week when media giant Comcast threatened to pull all of its funding support from a small non-profit charity because a teenage girl there dared to tweet a criticism of Comcast for hiring former FCC Chairman Baker as its own private lobbyist. Well, Comcast would like you to forget about all that and trust that this time it really will support free, independent press, honestly. 

You see, in order to push through the merger (assisted by Commissioner Baker, of course) between media conglomerates Comcast and NBC, Comcast agreed to "partner with" a minimum of five independent, non-profit news organizations. Ironically, the whole point of independent journalism is to allow reporters the freedom of commenting on stories of interest to the public without concern as to how such stories might affect the profits of corporate giants such as, say, Comcast. And while Comcast might want us to believe that freedom of the press and corporate imperialism are not mutually exclusive, their history of punitive treatment towards critics seems like pretty damning evidence to the contrary.

Reporter Josh Stearns over at Save The News suggests that readers should think twice about assuming that Comcast has the capacity, never mind the intention, to engage in truly free press:

The Reel Grrls example has to be a consideration for nonprofit journalism organizations who are thinking about working with the media giant around these local news partnerships. What happens when one of these nonprofits wants to cover a local telecommunications issue, or do a public interest piece on rising cable rates? Do local reporters have to worry if they tweet about how bad their Comcast Internet service is? If Comcast is watching its “digital footprint” this closely, you can bet it won’t be happy if one of their nonprofit news partners wants to investigate a story where the company is implicated....

If Comcast is willing to threaten a local youth media organization over a tweet, what would stop it from pulling funding from a local nonprofit journalism website over a story? For news organizations looking to get out from underneath the thumb of commercial media pressures that have gutted newsrooms and shaped coverage, these two are too close for comfort. And for the public looking for independent, watchdog journalism, be cautious if there’s a Comcast logo in the corner.

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The CDC Is Prepared For The Zombie Apocalypse

 

Kudos to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention for using a little creativity to educate the public about disaster preparedness. The CDC recently posted a blog article on how to prepare for a zombie apocalypse (and some non-supernatural disasters as well). While a typical post on the site would receive about 3000 page views per week, the CDC briefly crashed their own site when the article received over 30,000 views in just one day. Now that is is how public outreach is done.

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With Media Conglomerates In Charge, Watch What You Tweet

With the ever-dwindling number of independent companies involved in media broadcasting, perhaps it shouldn't surprise us that a cable corporation can threaten to pull all funding for a non-profit organization's summer programs just because someone there tweeted something the cable company didn't like...but that is exactly what happened last week.


Let's rewind a bit to see how this all fell out. The Communications Act of 1943 established the Federal Communications Commission, a government agency charged with regulating broadcasting and media in the United States. In other words, it is essentially the job of the FCC to determine who can broadcast what, when, how, and where, within the context of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech, which theoretically gives private citizens the right to say virtually anything without fear of recrimination - even if it is critical of someone in power. Freedom of speech is a concept integral to the ideals upon which the United States was supposedly founded, being the basis by which private citizens can affect the policies and procedures of the government officials they elected. It continues to be taught in schools as if it were a concrete, inviolable right of all U.S citizens. As one Seattle non-profit organization recently discovered, the reality is somewhat more hazy.


The FCC is also charged with regulating competition between the various media corporations. It is the job of the FCC to determine how much of the media market and transmission media (i.e. phone, radio, television, cable, magazines, newspapers, etc.) any individual company can own, theoretically to prevent monopolization of the entire market by only a few companies. Yet many people question the degree to which the FCC effectively deters market monopolization. During the last 30 years, ownership of the media market has dropped from roughly 50 companies to only 6 today; GE, Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom, and CBS.


Back to the present. Last January, the FCC voted to approve a highly controversial merger between NBC Universal and Comcast Corp, continuing a pattern of inter-merging that has already drastically reduced the number of media corporations active in the U. S., allowing the Big 6 to enjoy near total monopolization of the market here.


Last week, FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker, who helped push the merger through, announced that she will be leaving her post at the FCC to begin lobbying for the special interests of a private media corporation. I'll give you three guesses which one - actually, you only need two guesses. If you guessed Comcast, congratulations, you understand how politics in America work. Baker will now be on Comcast's payroll, and though she is technically barred from lobbying to the FCC for 2 years, she is free to being lobbying for Comcast's interests directly to elected officials immediately.


Though obviously a conflict of interest exists here, there is nothing illegal about what Baker has done. On the contrary, though direct manipulation of government officials is theoretically outlawed, the short and direct move from government to private lobbying is a frighteningly common one.

Ms. Baker’s swift shift from regulator to lobbyist for the regulated will only add to Americans’ cynicism about their government. The fact that it is legal and that she is just one of many doesn’t make it better. Over a third of the 120 lawmakers who left Congress after the last election have taken lobbying jobs, according to a report by the Center for Responsive Politics. Former F.C.C. Chairman Kevin Martin joined the lobbying firm Patton Boggs soon after he stepped down in 2009.

So what does all this have to do with small non-profit organization in Seattle that aims to empower girls from disadvantaged backgrounds? Nothing, or at least it shouldn't have. But when an member of Reel Grrls, an organization which is funded in part by donations from companies including Comcast, commented on the obvious conflict of interest in moves like Atwell's via her Twitter account (saying nothing that hasn't already been said thousands of times both in and out of FCC hearings) Comcast lashed out, threatening to pull all of the $18,000 the company had already committed to supporting the non-profit.

In an e-mail to Reel Grrls, Steve Kipp, a vice president of communications for Comcast in Lynnwood, Wash., wrote:

“Given the fact that Comcast has been a major supporter of Reel Grrls for several years now, I am frankly shocked that your organization is slamming us on Twitter. I cannot in good conscience continue to provide you with funding — especially when there are so many other deserving nonprofits in town.”

But Reel Grrls must be doing something right, because instead of lying down in the face of overt bullying, those girls put together this video...and, perhaps not so coincidentally, Comcast backed down.

The message to the youth of America: "Freedom of speech" is what corporations say it is. On the one hand, they may devote a miniscule percentage of their operating costs to support local charities that aim to empower disenfranchised youth - in return for good press, of course. On the other hand, don't get so empowered you think you can criticize the people with the big bank accounts. 

UPDATE (5/25/11): Comcast wants consumers to believe that it has a genuine interest in supporting free, independent press, despite its history of backlash against critics. 

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New Study Finds Wage Gap Non-Existant If You Eliminate Wage Gap From Said Study

I tried to stick to posting a brief, objective comment on the screamingly obvious design flaw in this study, I really did. But there was a "problem" with my account which led to my comments being repeatedly deleted from the site, so now I just can't resist a full-fledged rebuttal.

Everyone, I would like to introduce you to Carrie Lukas, an intelligent, educated, and probably well-meaning writer who nevertheless knows next to squat about research design or gender-influenced economics...which does not stop her from spouting out drivel about them at every possible (not to mention extremely profitable) opportunity. In fact, scratch that whole well-meaning part and replace it with "highly motivated by personal gain and a total disregard for little things like "facts" and "evidence."

Ms. Lukas's most recent misinformed diatribe was posted in yesterday's Wall Street Journal as a review of a "study" which supposedly found that the wage gap between men and women no longer exists. Yippie! Now we're all on a level playing field and what a relief to not have to worry about equal pay for equal work anymo...wait, what?

Oh, did I mention that this study was conducted using only single, childless, urban workers under the age of 30? That's right, when you remove little factors like families and age and where you live from the workforce study, it turns out that that whole wage gap thing magically disappears. Never mind that the national census including, you know, everyone, found that women still make an average of $.77 for every dollar a man makes (unless of course those women are Black, in which case they make $.68, or Latina, in which case they make $.58). And never mind that the wage gap is a reflection of subtle but consistent penalties placed upon the wage-earning potential of women who take maternity leave and still balance the majority of the child rearing and homemaking responsibilities at home with available opportunities for career advancement at work. And while we're at it, never mind that the effects of these penalties increase over time, so removing workers over age 30 from the study would automatically skew the results anyway. The point is, Ms. Lukas's eyes landed on a study that said exactly what she wanted to hear, so it must be right...right?

The reality is that this study actually points more evidence toward the fact that on a level playing field, women are entirely capable of performing just as well as men - and their salaries have begun to reflect that. But institutionalized gender bias distorts that playing field as soon as relationships and children enter the mix, and it is women with families - and their salaries - that suffer the most as a result. In fact, the wage gap between mothers and non-mothers is larger than the gap between women and men. To my mind, this is evidence that men are indeed beginning to take on more of the child rearing and homemaking chores...and perhaps their own salaries are beginning to show the strain.

And therein lies the great problem with gender bias; not that it oppresses one gender or another, but that it necessarily denigrates both genders at the same time. You simply cannot shove half of the population of an entire society into a one-size-fits-all boxed stereotype without automatically shoving the other half into the polar opposite box...and neither gender belongs there. Societal change is a process of two steps forward and one step back, and though we've come a long way there is still an awful lot of room for improvement.

Personally, I'll believe we've achieved true gender equality in this country when I see women taking the football field and men shaking the pom pons.

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6 Companies Run Your Whole Life, "Made In America" Blames You For Buying In

Meet the Usry family. They are the subjects of a new investigative series on ABC News, and they were set up to fail. 

The series is called "Made In America" and it questions the integrity of the spending habits of individual consumers. It purports to answer the question, "Is it possible for an All-American family to live with only all-American products?"

Good question.

But the folks over at CommonDreams.org are asking a better question - "Will ABC News' "Made In America" Series Avoid Their Boss, Disney?" 


Why is that a better question? We're glad you asked. You see, it all goes back to the discussion of independent media in the U. S. (see our post asking "Who IS Running The Show?"). There are 6 major media corporations which basically own every media outlet in the U. S. - the television networks, the publishing houses, the newspapers, the magazines, the radio stations ... pretty much every source of information (never mind gadgetry) that is easily accessible to you and me. One of those 6 corporations is Disney, which also happens to own ABC. So is this new show (a) taking an objective, in-depth look at American consumer spending habits or (b) distracting us from examining the spending habits of major corporations like Disney by encouraging us instead to point fingers at individual consumers?


Look at it this way:


Would you like to keep more of your consumer dollars in the U. S. economy? Heck yeah. So would we. You and I live here. We're trying to run businesses or earn paychecks or educate kids or write blogs or whatever it is we're doing, and we're trying to do it here, where we live and work and pay taxes and spend our money. We'd like to see some of that money return to us and our communities in the form of local customers, services, goods, programs, etc. 


Would major corporations like Disney like to keep more of its outgoing cash flow in the U. S. economy? Heck yea...oh, wait, it's cheaper to manufacture goods overseas? Heck no. Quick - look over there!


Disney is a business, a for-profit corporation, and there is one guiding concept to making a profit - spend as little as you can to make as much money as you can. So if Disney and other corporations can make a bigger profit by using foreign manufacturing and labor, you can bet your bottom dollar they will - regardless of how it affects the individual American consumer.


So it's all well and good for ABC to ask individual families to see what happens when they try to stick to only U. S. manufactured goods. Then if (and when) a family falls off the American-made wagon, we can all be so busy blaming them for the death of the American dream that we won't bother to look in Disney's direction.


But it's the major corporations - like Disney - who actually decide where those goods are manufactured. If we really want to try to keep more of our money local, they are the ones we'll have to convince.

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Chris Brown Calls Shenanigans, Might Actually Have A Point

Here at INSTITUTIONALIZED we believe that our society tends to filter information through layers of systematic, below-the-radar, even unintentional prejudice, including institutionalized racism. Nor do we hold ourselves apart from such behavior; on the contrary. Our point here is that these prejudices are so ingrained in our socialized world view that most of us don't even recognize them as prejudice.

Case in point: The post that launched INSTITUTIONALIZED - our discussion of the whole Charlie Sheen meltdown. Do we think the guy's crazy with a capital Z? You bet your Adonis DNA we do. But we questioned the degree to which immediate medical intervention was really necessary. We were speaking from the perspective of his audience, but we nevertheless failed to point out that Sheen has a fairly nasty history with domestic violence, including but not limited to "accidentally" shooting his then fiancee actress Kelly Preston in the arm (after which she subsequently ended their engagement. Yup, sounds like an accident to me).

While we were focusing on making the point that Sheen is not a threat to his audience, who but self-admitted abuser Chris Brown should point out our own unintentional hypocrisy? At the same time our society continues to condemn him at every opportunity for battering Rhianna (and rightfully so), Sheen has reportedly begun touring with a one-man-show netting him $7 million a month. He is currently adding more dates, since tickets for the original tour sold out in 18 minutes. 18 minutes you guys.

Brown addressed his aggravation with society's apparent willingness to embrace Sheen's violence while condemning his own after an interview on Good Morning America. Rather than getting an interview designed to promote his album (the only reason most performers agree to participate in such interviews at all) the interviewer focused in large part on Brown's past domestic violence charges. 

After the interview Brown reportedly threw a nice little hissy fit and then tweeted the following:

"I'm so over people bringing this past shit up!!! Yet we praise Charlie sheen and other celebs for their bullshit!"

(He apparently caught enough flak for that comment that he later deleted it.)

Now don't get me wrong, if anyone has the right to be annoyed with the constant media attention over the beating it's Rhianna, and she seems to be handling it just fine, so Brown can stick a sock in it as far as that goes. But he's not wrong about the interplay of racism and criminal justice issues. 

According to criminal law professionals at the University of Dayton:

• African Americans are arrested an average of 2.5 times more often than Whites in general, 3.5 times more often for violence or drug related charges, and 6 times more often for serious felony charges.
• African Americans are more likely to be sentenced to prison and less likely to be given probation than Whites.
• African Americans are sentenced to prison at a rate 6 times higher than that of Whites.
• Prison sentences average one year longer for African Americans than for their White counterparts convicted of similar crimes.
• African Americans are 5 times more likely to be sentenced to death row than their White counterparts.

Wouldn't it be so simple to explain the disparity by believing that African Americans are just inherently worse, meaner, more violent people than Whites? That way everything would be someone else's fault, we wouldn't have to pay attention to what's going on in the system, or examine our own beliefs, or ask how and why a nation supposedly founded on personal freedoms is systematically punishing its own citizens for being born the wrong color?

Yes it would be easier, simpler, safer ... and the epitome of institutionalized racism. 

Mr. Brown, you have a point. Now put your shirt back on.

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Who IS Running The Show?

I don't much care whether you think that popular media is too conservative or too liberal or right where it needs to be, because everyone is entitled to their opinion, even if it's wrong. But the broohaha over the funding of public radio has me thinking that we need to get some definitions clear, and we should probably start with the word "public."

Taxpayer dollars go to support National Public Radio because it is PUBLIC. That is what public means. Public = taxpayer owned/supported. That's as opposed to private, which means "owned and operated by an individual or private corporation." Therefore, PUBLIC radio is, by definition, taxpayer supported. We don't have to like it, but we should at least get the definition straight.  The real question, though, is why should Americans support public media at all? 

THE DEATH OF INDEPENDENT MEDIA 

Which leads us down the rabbit hole of wondering how much of the media in the U. S. is public, and how much is owned by private interests? The easiest way I know to answer that question is to explore the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Most of us know it through its connection with National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). Don't let the world "corporation" mislead you, this is a public corporation, meaning that our taxes support it.

And don't let THAT fool you into thinking that you're paying for all of NPR and PBS's programming - they receive only about 10% of their funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Currently the House of Representatives seems to think that 10% is too much and would like to slash it drastically, so there's that whole debate going on. But it's best we remember that the majority of these programs' funding comes from individual donors, which is why they don't have commercials for toothpaste but do have those pesky telethons several times a year. So basically, they operate by providing programming that members of the public like well enough to call in and shell out some dough to keep it on the air.

So that takes care of NPR and PBS.

But really, how much of your news comes from NPR and PBS? And what about the rest of the networks - NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, CNN, books, magazines, newspapers? Private. All private. So if you don't like what NPR and PBS have to say, don't call in and give them your donation, and that's how you have a voice in their programming. If you don't like what pretty much everyone else has to say - too bad. It's not your station.

So whose is it? That's the bad news. According to the Media Reform Information Center, in 1983 approximately 50 different stations owned the remainder of the media in the U. S. So 50 different corporations can't possibly all be in each others pockets, right? But they merged, and bought each other out, and engaged in hostile takeovers of each other, and as of 2004 virtually all the rest of the media in the United States was owned by exactly 5 companies. CBS has since joined in the fun, leaving us currently with 6, count them, 6 possible sources for our information. 

So unless you listen to NPR or PBS or search out independent media via the internet, you get virtually ALL of your news, radio, print, and programming from a total of 6 companies: Time Warner, Disney, NewsCorp owned by Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, General Electric, and CBS. And if you think those six companies would rather fight each other and compete for your advertising dollars that just share total monopolization of the entire media market, think again. They are not the government or the Public Broadcasting Corporation, you did not vote for them and you do not get a say in what they produce. They are in business for one reason and one reason only - the almighty dollar. So if sensationalized or skewed news gets more viewers (hence, more advertising dollars), then sensationalized and skewed it shall be.

And don't think they're not THRILLED to see this debate over whether the Public Broadcasting Corporation should continue to be supported by tax dollars. It is a win-win situation as far as they are concerned. Either we continue to bicker over whether we should support 10% or less of the independent, public media in the U. S., or we decide we should stop supporting independent, public media altogether. Either way, they continue controlling the vast majority of the market and we're all too busy pointing fingers at each other and our own government to look at who is really, literally, running the show.

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