continued: Corporatization of the Media: A discussion from News World 2000 conference in Barcelona
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Gowing: Danny, can you give me examples of bad journalism you claim are because of corporate pressure?

Danny Schechter: This just in from Florida, its Gore, no no wait a minute it's Bush, we don't know who it is. I think if we look at the stories everyone in the world is talking about right now and we think of it as simply a case of an error in projecting the results of one primary, as an example of why the media today says it has egg on its face, then we miss an institutional relationship between media and politics. A kind of merger is taking place that has not been noticed. With all the reporting on where the money comes from in politics, there is very little coverage of where it actually goes, which is back into the coffers of the media. What I am arguing is in fact media coverage is actually driving people away from political participation. That's one thing I would like to talk about, because I think it is directly related to why so many disclosures have come out now that were never raised before.

Hargreaves: Those are generalizations from a particular political angle and it's a respectable argument from that political angle. But it is significant that you didn't answer Nick's question directly. Neil Docherty had an example of a clear "they told us to do the wrong thing," where the corporation was to blame. How many do you know about?

Schechter: I have sat in meetings, like everyone else in this room has, knowing what the line is and where the line is drawn. What stories are not going to fly because your particular executive is not interested in that story, or is in other ways discouraging you from investigating it, or there's a lack of funding for investigative reporting so you don't even propose stories because you know there is no budget to carry them on. I would like to raise a current story that is not really being reported on. On September 3 this year, Mike Wallace interviewed Jiang Zemin, the president of China in a two-part segment, which is very unusual for "60 Minutes" for an interview. It was in my view one of the most surprisingly softball interviews that I have ever seen on television, so much so that President Clinton himself when he meet the Chinese president told him that Mike Wallace had Jiang Zemin purring like a little child, that he thought the interview was great, that he wished he could get an interview like that.

Two weeks later, in Hong Kong, Jiang Zemin attacked all journalists for asking him tough questions and said to them "why can't you be more like Mike Wallace?" Now, the context for this that I am curious about is a speech by Sumner Redstone, the president of Viacom, at a conference that Time Warner gave in Shanghai, basically calling on the media people there to go soft on China, we work in this country, let's not antagonize our host, this whole sort of line. And there followed from that in my view--and I looked carefully because I had just written a book about it--a real downplaying of the resistance in China today of the Falong Gong movement.

McChesney: Realistically if you look at the issues of human rights like you're talking about now in corporate media, it's truly only the Time Warners and the Viacoms who are strong enough to stand up to these governments, isn't it? Smaller media are the ones with journalists getting beat up and their stories not getting printed.

Schechter: They're doing business there and they don't want to stand up; they want to get along by going along, and that's the problem here. They're ingratiating themselves to a dictator in China, not asking tough questions, not doing followup, not informing people about what the issues really are.

McChesney: The head of MTV, which is part of Viacom, leads human rights campaigns across the world. There are corporate media figures who are doing wonderful human rights work.

Schechter: I ran the only human rights television series that was on for four years on public television in America, and in order to get it on the air we had to battle public television bureaucracy, which told us point blank, "human rights is an insufficient organizing principle for a television series."

McChesney: But that's not commercial television necessarily.

Schechter: We offered the same program to every cable channel and they weren't interested. If you're an African lion you can get your own show on cable in America. If you're an African person its much more difficult to get any exposure of the issues at all.

McChesney: Doesn't that say more about the American people than it does about the commercial media? I think that if CNN or Viacom thought there was an interest in this, they would gladly put these shows on.

Schechter: One of the most popular miniseries in the history of America was "Roots." Whether or not people will watch depends on how stories are presented. We have a lot of very creative producers who are capable of doing programming that is very compelling if they get the chance to do it. What we have seen across the board, and this includes BBC, is more and more docu-soaps, softer and softer features, less and less hard-hitting programming, and it is very difficult for independent producers particularly to crack through here.

Gowing: MBAs with no experience and little love for journalism are meddling in the newsroom, slipping product placement into new shows, censoring investigative reports that bite the hands that feed?

Schechter: You know, I think that goes on. I worked at ABC for 20/20. We did an investigation on the Statue of Liberty renovation in Manhattan, which was a commission headed by Lee Iacocca, the president of Chrysler. It was announced that ABC was given exclusive access to cover the event itself, and President Reagan came and spoke, Ted Koppel presided over it. They turned what was a legitimate news story into a celebration sponsored by a news division. They made it into an event.

Hargreaves: Do you think that television journalism is better in other countries where the companies that deliver it are less corporate dominated?

Schechter: From my own personal experiences, having studied at the London School of Economics for two years, I'm impressed by the culture of the BBC, I'm impressed by public service broadcasting around the world, and I'd like to see an improvement in the United States.

Gowing: What about independent TV as well?

Schechter: I think there is some hard-hitting and good journalism. But I think in our own country there has been a 50 percent decline at the network level of coverage of the world.

McChesney: What about China's national television service? How do they do in human rights?

Schechter: I don't think they cover it. When I was in Beijing at a conference and I told them what public television in the United States told us about human rights not being a sufficient organizing principle for a TV series, they said, "here we would agree with that." I think there is unfortunately a uniformity of view as market values increasingly drive journalistic culture.

Hargreaves: But to engage with Chris Kramer's statement, which is that he as a senior news executive felt in some way more constrained working inside the BBC than he has at CNN: he's not making that up, but it makes no sense in the context we're discussing. Because you are insisting on pinning everything on the business corporate system, whereas we should be looking at where the locus of power and ownership is, whatever it is.

Schechter: You are kind of giving a didactic view here to some degree. In some ways, curiously, I agree with Chris. I don't think this is a conspiracy as much as that in public television today you have as much branding, as much corporate underwriting concerns, as much market-driven, demographic research and the rest as you have in the corporate sector. Yes, ownership is very important, but I think it is the culture of the news values and the amount of money that is really allocated to coverage--and that has been shrinking, as have news divisions.

Hargreaves: What's your view about the ability of new media, things like your own organization, to puncture some of this?

Schechter: I have a lot of hope that we will be able to create on the Internet a public space similar to what public service broadcasting represented when it first began. Our MediaChannel was an attempt to monitor media organizations worldwide. We started with 50 organizations; we now have 550 groups from around the world. We have a global approach and an analytical approach and a very diverse approach. We have conservative groups as well as groups on the left. We are trying to create the kind of debate that we are having here on a regular basis.

Gowing: Do you expect today to get any corporate pressure or funding pressure?

Schechter: We actually have some corporate support, and we would like to get more of it. To tell you the truth, if I know that company A is interested in supporting the environment and the media, and I'm interested in involving corporations in the media, I might be tempted to put together a program on the media and the environment because I can get funding for it. That is a reality.

Gowing: Would you compromise your journalism then?

Schecter: It hasn't so far--we try to safeguard standards.

Hargreaves: But the reality is that in some sense it must.

Schechter: Well, I think you have to judge. Is there integrity in what we are doing? Check it out and see for yourself, you may have a very different view than I have.

McChesney: Dan, it just seems that this rise of the Internet just proves that there is no reason to bash Viacom or AOL. You got your chance to do this now, in our age people like the sort of journalism that you are doing and they will flock to it, and you'll force these other people to start doing what you are doing.

Schechter: But when I started off with an independent company called Globalvision we were very excited about getting the means of production--suddenly the means of production came down in cost, but we still don't have the means of distribution. We can't market like larger companies. We simply don't have the budget to do the promotion and marketing that increasingly consumes large parts of news budgets.

McChesney: They all started small too.

Schechter: Except you have a series of people who have guaranteed access to the airwaves from regulators, and they have been able to dominate the whole broadcast spectrum. The cost of entry for an independent voice or another voice is very difficult. That's why Bruce Springsteen has a song "57 Channels and Nothing On." It's a homogenous world more than a diverse world, unfortunately.

Cramer: It has nothing to do with conspiracy but it has to do with economics. In the year 2000 most organizations have fewer international bureaus than they did ten years ago. Why is it that most organizations are closing their bureaus? Why is it that they are cutting news costs? It's not conspiracy, it's economics. That for me is much more dangerous.

Gowing: But that's affecting the editorial agenda.

Cramer: Of course it is.

Docherty: I want to clarify that I'm not claiming there is a conspiracy. I am claiming that these economic constraints are what is increasingly going to put us under pressure. In fact what happened in CBS's case is that I think Lawrence Tisch positioned his company to be taken over. And he closed foreign bureaus, he greatly restricted the reach of CBS. He then got more value for his investment. The other thing that I would say is that the test of this whether the system is working is when its stressed. The case in 1995 of both CBS and ABC giving in to the tobacco industry was a clear example of how the system responded under stress, and I would argue that it didn't respond very well. continued

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