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From
the New York Times
http://www.truthout.org/index.htm
The China Syndrome
By Paul Krugman
Tuesday 13 May 2003
A funny thing happened
during the Iraq war: many Americans turned to the BBC for their TV news. They
were looking for an alternative point of view - something they couldn't find on
domestic networks, which, in the words of the BBC's director general, "wrapped
themselves in the American flag and substituted patriotism for impartiality."
Leave aside the rights
and wrongs of the war itself, and consider the paradox. The BBC is owned by the
British government, and one might have expected it to support that government's
policies. In fact, however, it tried hard - too hard, its critics say - to stay
impartial. America's TV networks are privately owned, yet they behaved like state-run
media.
What explains this paradox?
It may have something to do with the China syndrome. No, not the one involving
nuclear reactors - the one exhibited by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation when
dealing with the government of the People's Republic.
In the United States,
Mr. Murdoch's media empire - which includes Fox News and The New York Post - is
known for its flag-waving patriotism. But all that patriotism didn't stop him
from, as a Fortune article put it, "pandering to China's repressive regime to
get his programming into that vast market." The pandering included dropping the
BBC's World Service - which reports news China's government doesn't want disseminated
- from his satellite programming, and having his publishing company cancel the
publication of a book critical of the Chinese regime.
Can something like that
happen in this country? Of course it can. Through its policy decisions - especially,
though not only, decisions involving media regulation - the U.S. government can
reward media companies that please it, punish those that don't. This gives private
networks an incentive to curry favor with those in power. Yet because the networks
aren't government-owned, they aren't subject to the kind of scrutiny faced by
the BBC, which must take care not to seem like a tool of the ruling party. So
we shouldn't be surprised if America's "independent" television is far more deferential
to those in power than the state-run systems in Britain or - for another example
- Israel.
A recent report by Stephen
Labaton of The Times contained a nice illustration of the U.S. government's ability
to reward media companies that do what it wants. The issue was a proposal by Michael
Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to relax regulations
on media ownership. The proposal, formally presented yesterday, may be summarized
as a plan to let the bigger fish eat more of the smaller fish. Big media companies
will be allowed to have a larger share of the national market and own more TV
stations in any given local market, and many restrictions on "cross-ownership"
- owning radio stations, TV stations and newspapers in the same local market -
will be lifted.
The plan's defects aside
- it will further reduce the diversity of news available to most people - what
struck me was the horse-trading involved. One media group wrote to Mr. Powell,
dropping its opposition to part of his plan "in return for favorable commission
action" on another matter. That was indiscreet, but you'd have to be very naïve
not to imagine that there are a lot of implicit quid pro quos out there.
And the implicit trading
surely extends to news content. Imagine a TV news executive considering whether
to run a major story that might damage the Bush administration - say, a follow-up
on Senator Bob Graham's charge that a Congressional report on Sept. 11 has been
kept classified because it would raise embarrassing questions about the administration's
performance. Surely it would occur to that executive that the administration could
punish any network running that story.
Meanwhile, both the formal
rules and the codes of ethics that formerly prevented blatant partisanship are
gone or ignored. Neil Cavuto of Fox News is an anchor, not a commentator. Yet
after Baghdad's fall he told "those who opposed the liberation of Iraq" - a large
minority - that "you were sickening then; you are sickening now." Fair and balanced.
We don't have censorship
in this country; it's still possible to find different points of view. But we
do have a system in which the major media companies have strong incentives to
present the news in a way that pleases the party in power, and no incentive not
to.
ENDS
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