Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [255]
40. Is it not possible that if the populace “demands” program content greatly disliked by the owners, competition and the quest for profits will cause them to offer such programming? There is some truth in this, and it, along with the limited autonomy of media personnel, may help explain the “surprises” that crop up occasionally in the mass media. One limit to the force of public demand, however, is that the millions of customers have no means of registering their demand for products that are not offered to them. A further problem is that the owners’ class interests are reinforced by a variety of other filters that we discuss below.
41. Quoted in Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, p. 31.
42. Ibid., p. 41.
43. “. . . producers presenting patrons [advertisers] with the greatest opportunities to make a profit through their publics will receive support while those that cannot compete on this score will not survive” (Joseph Turow, Media Industries: The Production of News and Entertainment [New York: Longman, 1984], p. 52).
44. Noncommercial television is also at a huge disadvantage for the same reason, and will require a public subsidy to be able to compete. Because public television does not have the built-in constraints of ownership by the wealthy, and the need to appease advertisers, it poses a threat to a narrow elite control of mass communications. This is why conservatives struggle to keep public television on a short leash, with annual funding decisions, and funding at a low level (see Barnouw, The Sponsor, pp. 179–82). Another option pursued in the Carter-Reagan era has been to force it into the commercial nexus by sharp defunding.
45. Bagdikian, Media Monopoly, pp. 118–26. “‘The dominant paper ultimately thrives,’ Gannett Chairman Allen H. Neuharth says. ‘The weaker paper ultimately dies’” (Joseph B. White, “Knight-Ridder’s No-Lose Plan Backfires,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 4, 1988).
46. Quoted in Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, p. 43.
47. “Advertising and the Press,” in James Curran, ed., The British Press: A Manifesto (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 252–55.
48. Ibid., p. 254.
49. 1984 CBS Annual Report, p. 13. This is a further refinement in the measurement of “efficiency” in “delivering an audience.” In the magazine business, the standard measure is CPM, or “costs per thousand,” to an advertiser to reach buyers through a full-page, black-and-white ad. Recent developments, like CBS’s CAP, have been in the direction of identifying the special characteristics of the audience delivered. In selling itself to advertisers, the Soap Opera Digest says: “But you probably want to know about our first milestone: today Soap Opera Digest delivers more women in the 18–49 category at the lowest CPM than any other women’s magazine” (quoted in Turow, Media Industries, p. 55).
50. William Evan, Organization Theory (New York: Wiley, 1976), p. 123.
51. Turow asserts that “The continual interaction of producers and primary patrons plays a dominant part in setting the general boundary conditions for day-to-day production activity” (Media Industries, p. 51).
52. Quoted in Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 253.
53. Pat Aufderheide, “What Makes Public TV Public?” The Progressive (January 1988).
54. “Castor oil or Camelot?” December 5, 1987. For further materials on such interventions, see Harry Hammitt, “Advertising Pressures on Media,” Freedom of Information Center Report no. 367 (School of Journalism, University of Missouri at Columbia, February 1977). See also James Aronson, Deadline for the Media (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), pp. 261–63.
55. According to Procter & Gamble’s instructions to their ad agency, “There will be no material on any of our programs which could in any way further the concept of business as cold, ruthless, and lacking in all sentiment or spiritual motivation.” The manager of corporate communications