Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [256]
56. Barnouw, The Sponsor, p. 135.
57. Advertisers may also be offended by attacks on themselves or their products. On the tendency of the media to avoid criticism of advertised products even when very important to consumer welfare [e.g., the effects of smoking], see Bagdikian, Media Monopoly, pp. 168–73.
58. This is hard to prove statistically, given the poor data made available by the FCC over the years. The long-term trend in advertising time/programming time is dramatically revealed by the fact that in 1929 the National Association of Broadcasting adopted as a standard of commercial practice on radio the following: “Commercial announcements . . . shall not be broadcast between 7 and 11 P.M.” William Paley testified before the Senate Commerce Committee in 1930 that only 22 percent of CBS’s time was allocated to commercially sponsored programs, with the other 78 percent sustaining; and he noted that advertising took up only “seven-tenths of 1 percent of all our time” (quoted in Public Service Responsibility of Broadcast Licensees, FCC [Washington: GPO, Mar. 7, 1946], p. 42). Frank Wolf states in reference to public-affairs programming: “That such programs were even shown at all on commercial television may have been the result of FCC regulation” (Television Programming for News and Public Affairs [New York: Praeger, 1972], p. 138; see also pp. 99–139).
59. Barnouw, The Sponsor, p. 134.
60. For Alcoa’s post–antitrust-suit sponsorship of Edward R. Murrow, and ITT’s post–early-1970s-scandals sponsorship of “The Big Blue Marble,” see Barnouw, The Sponsor, ibid., pp. 51–52, 84–86. Barnouw shows that network news coverage of ITT was sharply constrained during the period of ITT program sponsorship.
61. Barnouw, The Sponsor, p. 150.
62. Mark Fishman, Manufacturing the News (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), p. 143.
63. Ibid., pp. 144–45.
64. Gaye Tuchman, “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen’s Notions of Objectivity,” American Journal of Sociology 77, no. 2 (1972), pp. 662–64.
65. United States Air Force, “Fact Sheet: The United States Air Force Information Program” (March 1979); “News Releases: 600,000 in a Year,” Air Force Times, April 28, 1980.
66. J. W. Fulbright, The Pentagon Propaganda Machine (New York: H. Liveright, 1970), p. 88.
67. Ibid., p. 90.
68. An Associated Press report on “Newspapers Mustered as Air Force Defends B1B,” published in the Washington Post, April 3, 1987, indicates that the U.S. Air Force had 277 newspapers in 1987, as compared with 140 in 1979.
69. “DOD Kills 205 Periodicals; Still Publishes 1,203 Others,” Armed Forces Journal International (August 1982), p. 16.
70. Its nine regional offices also had some public-information operations, but personnel and funding are not readily allocable to this function. They are smaller than the central office aggregate.
The AFSC aggregate public-information budget is about the same size as the contract given by the State Department to International Business Communications (IBC) for lobbying on behalf of the contras ($419,000). This was only one of twenty-five contracts investigated by the GAO that “the Latin American Public Diplomacy office awarded to individuals for research and papers on Central America, said a GAO official involved in the investigation” (Rita Beamish, “Pro-contra Contracts are Probed,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 22, 1987, p. 4A).
71. The NCC’s news services are concentrated in the Office of Information, but it has some dispersed staff in communications functions elsewhere in the organization that produce a few newsletters, magazines, and some videotapes and filmstrips.
72. In 1980, Mobil Oil had a public-relations budget of $21 million and a public-relations staff of seventy-three. Between 1976 and 1981 it produced at least a dozen televised special reports on such issues as gasoline prices, with a hired