Reason #38: Big Stories Blacked Out and Buried
“The news is what we tell you it is.” - Fox News executive.
There’s no doubt that the corporate-owned press ignores tough, complicated issues because they aren’t ratings blockbusters. But there’s another, darker reason for this media blackout. Often, broadcasting certain scoops will reflect badly on the government or big corporate powers - sometimes even the very companies that own the networks and newspapers. Those stories, more often than not, wind up on the cutting room floor instead of in our living rooms or on the front pages where they belong.
General Electric, which owns NBC, has a long history of polluting. In 2001, the government ordered the company to pay for a half a billion dollar cleanup of the Hudson River. How much coverage do you think that decision got on NBC’s family of networks? If you said ‘not much,” you’d be giving them too much credit. “Little to none” is more like it.
GE’s suppression of how it spoiled the Hudson is only one case of how it lords over its media subsidiaries. When the stock market tanked in 1987, former GE CEO Jack Welch called the head of NBC News and ordered him not to call the sell-off “Black Monday” because it was helping to drive down GE’s share price. Welch was also reportedly fond of reminding the news director that he worked for General Electric, not NBC News. Maybe his bullying explains why the Today Show did a segment on consumer boycotts in the early 1990’s but failed to mention one of the biggest boycotts going on at the time - the one against GE!
Big conglomerates like GE don’t have to own networks to influence the news. They also buy themselves media cover by throwing around massive amounts of sponsorship money. Both GE and Archer Daniels Midland give heavily to the Public Broadcasting System, our supposedly nonbiased state-owned media company. To repay them for their generosity, news programs on PBS do a hell of a lot more than play their jingles at the beginning of their broadcasts. For one thing, they hardly ever mention corporate welfare in this country, or the massive federal subsidies ADM receives every year for wasteful programs like ethanol. And their coverage of nuclear power, one of GE’s main businesses, has been blatantly positive. In the mid-1990’s, PBS even declined to air an Oscar-winning documentary critical of GE’s nuclear profiteering.
GE and ADM aren’t the only corporations to use their pocketbooks to stamp out bad news coverage and PBS isn’t the only media outlet willing to kowtow to them. In the late 1990’s, a pair of reporters for a FOX TV station in Florida worked up a potentially powerful piece about how a synthetic hormone made by a corporation called Monsanto was threatening the safety of our milk supply. The journalists even discovered evidence that Monsanto’s hormone might cause cancer. Because of these issues, many foreign governments banned the use of the hormone. But our government was all too willing to send it to market.
That sounds like a big story, doesn’t it? One that any editor or producer would be eager to get on air? Yet it was never broadcast. Why not? Because Monsanto has enormous political clout and major advertising contracts with FOX and other news networks. When its lawyers demanded that the network kill the piece, they rolled over. The station manager allegedly told the reporters that because FOX “paid $3 billion” for numerous local stations like theirs, “The news is what we tell you it is.”
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