Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [252]
12. Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), p. xvi.
13. David L. Paletz and Robert M. Entman, Media. Power. Politics (New York: Free Press, 1981), p. 7; Stephen Hess, The Government/Press Connection: Press Officers and Their Offices (Washington: Brookings, 1984), pp. 99–100.
14. The four major Western wire services—Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, and Agence-France-Presse—account for some 80 percent of the international news circulating in the world today. AP is owned by member newspapers; UPI is privately owned; Reuters was owned mainly by the British media until it went public in 1984, but control was retained by the original owners by giving lesser voting rights to the new stockholders; Agence-France-Presse is heavily subsidized by the French government. As is pointed out by Jonathan Fenby, the wire services “exist to serve markets,” and their prime concern, accordingly, “is with the rich media markets of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, and increasingly with the business community . . .” They compete fiercely, but AP and UPI “are really U.S. enterprises that operate on an international scale . . . Without their domestic base, the AP and UPI could not operate as international agencies. With it, they must be American organizations, subject to American pressures and requirements” (The International News Services [New York: Schocken, 1986], pp. 7, 9, 73–74). See also Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics of Information: How Western Culture Dominates the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), chapter 3.
15. The fourteenth annual Roper survey, “Public Attitudes toward Television and Other Media in a Time of Change” (May 1985), indicates that in 1984, 64 percent of the sample mentioned television as the place “where you usually get most of your news about what’s going on in the world today . . .” (p. 3). It has often been noted that the television networks themselves depend heavily on the prestige newspapers, wire services, and government for their choices of news. Their autonomy as newsmakers can be easily exaggerated.
16. The members of the very top tier qualify by audience outreach, importance as setters of news standards, and asset and profit totals. The last half dozen or so in our twenty-four involve a certain amount of arbitrariness of choice, although audience size is still our primary criterion. McGraw-Hill is included because of its joint strength in trade books and magazines of political content and outreach.
17. As noted in table 1–1, note 7, Storer came under the temporary control of the securities firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. in 1985. As its ultimate fate was unclear at the time of writing, and as financial data were no longer available after 1984, we have kept Storer on the table and list it here, despite its uncertain status.
18. John Kluge, having taken the Metromedia system private in a leveraged buyout in 1984 worth $1.1 billion, sold off various parts of this system in 1985–86 for $5.5 billion, at a personal profit of some $3 billion (Gary Hector, “Are Shareholders Cheated by LBOs?” Fortune, Jan. 17, 1987, p. 100). Station KDLA-TV, in Los Angeles, which had been bought by a management-outsider group in a leveraged buyout in 1983 for $245 million, was sold to the Tribune Company for $510 million two years later (Richard Stevenson, “Tribune in TV Deal for $510 Million,” New York Times, May 7, 1985). See also “The Media Magnates: Why Huge Fortunes Roll Off the Presses,” Fortune, October 12, 1987.
19. A split among the heirs of James E. Scripps eventually resulted in the sale of the Detroit Evening News. According to one news article, “Daniel Marentette, a Scripps family member and a self described “angry shareholder,” says family members want a better return on their money. “We get better yields investing in a New York checking account,” says Mr. Marentette, who