Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [254]
25. As we noted in the preface, the neoconservatives speak regularly of “liberal” domination of the media, assuming or pretending that the underlings call the shots, not the people who own or control the media. These data, showing the wealth position of media owners, are understandably something they prefer to ignore. Sometimes, however, the neoconservatives go “populist,” and—while financed by Mobil Oil Corporation and Richard Mellon Scaife—pretend to be speaking for the “masses” in opposition to a monied elite dominating the media. For further discussion, see Edward S. Herman’s review of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, “Michael Novak’s Promised Land: Unfettered Corporate Capitalism,” Monthly Review (October 1983), and the works cited in the preface, note 3.
26. Similar results are found in Peter Dreier, “The Position of the Press in the U.S. Power Structure,” Social Problems (February 1982), pp. 298–310.
27. Benjamin Compaine et al., Anatomy of the Communications Industry: Who Owns the Media? (White Plains, N.Y.: Knowledge Industry Publications, 1982), p. 463.
28. Ibid., pp. 458–60.
29. See Edward S. Herman, Corporate Control, Corporate Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 26–54.
30. For the interests of fifteen major newspaper companies in other media fields, and a checklist of other fields entered by leading firms in a variety of media industries, see Compaine, Anatomy of the Communications Industry, tables 2.19 and 8.1, pp. 11 and 452–53.
31. The merger had been sanctioned by the FCC but was stymied by intervention of the Department of Justice. See “A broken engagement for ITT and ABC,” Business Week, January 6, 1967.
32. Ibid.
33. On the enormous and effective lobbying operations of GE, see Thomas B. Edsall, “Bringing Good Things to GE: Firm’s Political Savvy Scores in Washington,” Washington Post, April 13, 1985.
34. The widely quoted joke by A. J. Liebling—that if you don’t like what your newspaper says you are perfectly free to start or buy one of your own—stressed the impotence of the individual. In a favorable political climate such as that provided by the Reagan administration, however, a giant corporation not liking media performance can buy its own, as exemplified by GE.
35. Allan Sloan, “Understanding Murdoch—The Numbers Aren’t What Really Matters,” Forbes, March 10, 1986, pp. 114ff.
36. On the Nixon-Agnew campaign to bully the media by publicity attacks and threats, see Marilyn Lashner, The Chilling Effect in TV News (New York: Praeger, 1984). Lashner concluded that the Nixon White House’s attempt to quiet the media “succeeded handily, at least as far as television is concerned . . .” (p. 167). See also Fred Powledge, The Engineering of Restraint: The Nixon Administration and the Press (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1971), and William E. Porter, Assault on the Media: The Nixon Years (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976).
37. Of the 290 directors in his sample of large newspapers, 36 had high-level positions—past or present—in the federal government (Dreier, “The Position of the Press,” p. 303).
38. One study showed that of sixty-five FCC commissioners and high-level staff personnel who left the FCC between 1945 and 1970, twelve had come out of the private-communications sector before their FCC service, and thirty-four went into private-firm service after leaving the commission (Roger Noll et al., Economic Aspects of Television Regulation [Washington: Brookings, 1973], p. 123).
39. “The symbiotic growth of American television and global enterprise has made them so interrelated that they cannot be thought of as separate. They are essentially the same phenomenon. Preceded far and wide by military advisers, lobbyists, equipment salesmen, advertising specialists, merchandising experts, and telefilm salesmen as advance agents, the enterprise penetrates much of the non-socialist world. Television is simply its most visible portion” (Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor [New York: Oxford University Press, 1978], p. 158). For a broader picture, see