Banned in the Media: A Reference Guide to Censorship in the Press, Motion Pictures, Broadcasting, and the Internet
Banned in the Media: A Reference Guide to Censorship in the Press,
Motion Pictures, Broadcasting, and the Internet,
By Herbert N. Foerstel
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Introduction
The 1996 Oxford Modern English Dictionary defines the "media" as "the
main means of mass communication (esp. newspapers and broadcasting)." The
1995 Cambridge Paperback Encyclopedia ( David Crystal , ed., 2d ed., 1995) says
"media" is "a collective term for television, radio, cinema,
and the press." This book will use these standard definitions, with one
modification: the inclusion of the Internet, the newest and most controversial
form of mass communication.
There is little doubt that the media have overwhelmed books as the preferred
source of information and entertainment worldwide, and the United States is
both the primary producer and the primary consumer of the media product. A recent
study conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and the New York communications investment
house, Veronis Suhler, produced some startling figures. The media business has
become one of the twelve largest industries in the United States. Profits are
high; operating margins range from 5.4 percent for the emerging interactive
digital media to more than 16 percent for broadcasters. Several of the big newspapers
do even better. The expectation is that the growth rate of newspaper revenues
will double between 1995 and the year 2000, and the other media will do almost
as well. 1
More interesting is the data indicating the stranglehold that the media have
on the American public. The ordinary American spends 3,400 hours a year consuming
the media output. That represents almost 40 percent of our lives, more time
than we spend sleeping and far more time than we spend working. Radio and television
represent 80 percent of our media consumption. Our reading occupies about an
hour a day, half of it for newspapers. By the year 2000, according to the study,
we will be reading even less, watching television even more, and spending more
time on the Internet. 2
Little wonder, then, that we hear so much about the power of the media and
its influence on everything from morality to politics. The current problem is
not the growing media power, but the narrowing corporate cabal that wields it.
In 1983 Ben Bagdikian, then journalism dean at the University of California,
Berkeley, published The Media Monopoly, which revealed that at least half of
all media business was controlled by just fifty corporations. By 1987, when
his second edition appeared, he reported that just twenty-nine corporations
exercised that power, and by the time of his fourth edition in 1992, that number
had shrunk to twenty. Bagdikian noted a similar evolution in newspapers and
magazines. Of the 1,700 daily newspapers in this country, 98 percent were local
monopolies and most of their combined circulation was controlled by fewer than
fifteen corporations. Among magazines, Time, Inc., alone was responsible for
40 percent of industry revenues. 3
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Bagdikian wrote,
[A] shrinking number of large media corporations now regard monopoly, oligopoly,
and historic levels of profit as not only normal, but as their earned right.
In the process, the usual democratic expectations for the media -- diversity
of ownership and ideas -- have disappeared as the goal of official policy, and
worse, as a daily experience of a generation of American viewers and readers.
. . . It's no way to maintain a lively marketplace of ideas, which is to say
it is no way to maintain a democracy. 4
Bagdikian's trailblazing research and widely praised 1987 edition of The Media
Monopoly were virtually ignored by the media. His explanation of why the major
media had failed to discuss the disadvantages of media consolidation was simple:
editors were not interested in these problems because they were all in the newspaper
consolidation business themselves.
Indeed, the media's failure to address the most significant problem in its
industry caused that very issue to be declared the "most censored news
story of 1987" by the prestigious Project Censored. Every year since 1977,
Project Censored, based at Sonoma State University, has published its list of
the news issues or "stories" that have been most heavily suppressed
during the previous year. The judges who selected the media monopoly story as
the "most censored" during 1987 included John Kenneth Galbraith, Bill
Moyers, and Judith Krug. Communications professor Carl Jensen, originator of
Project Censored, said the judges selected the media monopoly story because
it was the root cause for underreporting generally. "We have fewer sources,
fewer outlets and more control by fewer people," said Jensen. 5
The problem of media monopolies has worsened in recent years, but it continues
to be ignored by the media. Project Censored's latest edition, Censored 1997.
The News That Didn't Make the News, featured an article, "Free the Media,"
that literally mapped out the four giant corporations that control the major
television news divisions: the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the American
Broadcasting Company (ABC), the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the Cable
News Network (CNN). Author Mark Miller notes that two of the four holding corporations
are defense contractors (both involved in nuclear production), and the other
two purvey entertainment. Miller concludes that we are thus the subjects of
a "national entertainment state," in which the news and much of our
amusement are provided by the two most powerful industries in the United States.
Miller presents an elaborate chart that maps the tentacles of General Electric,
Time Warner, Disney/Cap Cities and Westinghouse, the four media giants. He says
a glance at each chart reveals why, say, Tom Brokaw might have difficulty covering
stories critical of nuclear power, or ABC News will no longer be likely to do
an exposé of Disney's policies, or, indeed, why none of the media is
willing to touch the biggest story of them all -- the media monopoly itself.
Miller says such maps "suggest the true causes of those enormous ills
that now dismay so many Americans: the universal sleaze and 'dumbing down,'
the flood tide of corporate propaganda, the terminal inanity of U.S. politics."
He warns that "the same gigantic players that control the elder media are
planning shortly to absorb the Internet, which could be transformed from a thriving
common wilderness into an immeasurable de facto cyberpark for corporate interests,
with all the dissident voices exiled to sites known only to the activists."
Only a new, broad-based antitrust movement can save the media, according to
Miller. 6
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The media have always been the captive of religion and politics, scorned and
manipulated by both in ways beyond anything suffered by book publishers. A recent
example of the former is the boycott launched by Baptists against the Walt Disney
Company. On June 18, 1997, the Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas, Texas
overwhelmingly approved a resolution urging the denomination's 15.7 million
members to boycott all presentations and products bearing the Disney name and
everything produced by the vast Disney conglomerate that includes Miramax Films,
ABC television, ESPN, E! and Disney cable channels and Hyperion Books. The primary
objection expressed by the Baptists was Disney's support for homosexuals, as
represented by ABC's sitcom "Ellen," whose star is an admitted lesbian
and Disney's willingness to grant health benefits to the partners of homosexual
employees.
The Baptists admit that the effectiveness of the boycott may not be immediately
evident, but Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission,
said, "The Crusades were not a high point in public relations for the church,
but they give people a feeling of accomplishment, and this boycott may do the
same for many Americans." 7
Banned in the U.S.A. ( 1994) examined censorship in book publishing, but only
in the context of schools and libraries. This book may be regarded as a sequel
to Banned in the U.S.A., but there are significant differences. Banned in the
Media examines censorship in six formats -newspapers, magazines, radio, television,
motion pictures and the Internet-in a wide variety of contexts. Whereas individual
books can be plucked from school classrooms or library shelves by nervous school
or library officials, much of the media product is ephemeral, and its censorship
is wielded with a broader brush.
An important distinction between my methodologies for analyzing books and the
media is the manner in which incidents of censorship are tallied and compared.
The number of times a particular book title is banned from school curricula
or removed from library shelves can be tallied and a list of the most banned
books can be assembled, but much of the media does not admit to such particularization.
The wide and disparate variety of media formats make it impossible to analyze
statistically and rank incidents across the entire media. Frequently, it is
even difficult to isolate and identify the origin of media censorship.
Serial publications, particularly magazines, are uniquely vulnerable to newsstand
or convenience store boycotts. They also suffer censorship of individual articles
or issues. Motion pictures, like books, have been banned in ways that allow
statistical analysis, but the monolithic
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posted by Victor Lloyd Smith @ 5:31 PM
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