From corporation-watch at countercorp.org Mon Aug 10 03:14:22 2009 From: corporation-watch at countercorp.org (Corporation Watch) Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:14:22 -0700 Subject: [Corp. Watch] For corporate media, good PR is more important than substance or accuracy References: <1099835725.252933075@org.orgDB.mail.democracyinaction.org> Message-ID: <7711CA7A-A965-44BE-A63B-71766D661D83@countercorp.org> Did General Electric Stifle Keith Olbermann? Fox and MSNBC's "gentlemen's agreement" (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Aug. 7) -- In the wake of an August 1 expose in the New York Times, an agreement reportedly reached by executives at the parent companies of Fox News Channel and MSNBC to rein in the networks' two stars' criticism of each other seems to have fallen apart. The behind-the-scenes deal-making nonetheless illustrates the corrosive effect of corporate ownership on media. The alleged deal concerned MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly. The two hosts have feuded for years; Olbermann's rants about O'Reilly helped make his show MSNBC's top- rated show. In response to Olbermann's on-air criticism of him, O'Reilly attacked not only Olbermann, but the entire NBC franchise and parent company General Electric (GE) -- zeroing in on the corporation's business with Iran. "If my child were killed in Iraq," O'Reilly in April 2008, "I would blame the likes of [GE CEO] Jeffrey Immelt." Many questions remain about the nature of the deal. Olbermann denied there was any agreement limiting his speech, and criticized Fox and O'Reilly right after the Times story was published on Aug. 3. O'Reilly, in turn, resumed his criticism of GE, on his Aug. 5 show. But according to a May 19, 2008 account by the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, Fox News chair Roger Ailes "warned that if Olbermann didn't stop such attacks against Fox, he would unleash O'Reilly against NBC." As one GE spokesperson put it, executives at Fox parent News Corporation "[told] us if the attacks on O'Reilly end, the attacks on GE will end. They've had conversations with our news executives saying, 'If you stop, we'll stop.''' More than a year later, the New York Times report depicted executives at both companies as being eager to end the conflict -- Reuters reported that GE in particular had seen O'Reilly's criticism spill over into a shareholder meeting, where questions were asked about GE's activities in Iran. When Immelt and News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch were interviewed at a Microsoft-sponsored CEO summit in May of this year, the Times report indicates that they expressed interest in a truce of some sort. Soon thereafter, an agreement was hashed out, and the criticism from both sides dramatically diminished. According to the Times, MSNBC president Phil Griffin "told producers that he wanted the channel's other programs to follow Olbermann's lead and restrain from criticizing Fox directly, according to two employees." For his part, Olbermann told the paper, "I am party to no deal." And while he seemed adamant that he was not under any obligation to stop criticizing Fox, other MSNBC sources indicated that they felt muzzled. Indeed, Salon's Glenn Greenwald reported last week that one regular MSNBC guest "was recently told by a segment producer that explicit mentions of Fox News were prohibited," and that "there has been talk among MSNBC employees ever since the GE edict was issued about ways to protest it and to stand up for their journalistic freedom. ... Everything has been discussed at MSNBC from joint defiance of this edict to mini-strikes in the form of prolonged vacations and absences." While one might expect little in the way of journalistic ethics from Fox News, what about MSNBC? While the channel does have a more liberal political slant -- at least for a few hours in the evening-- it is certainly not immune from corporate pressure. Most notably, MSNBC canceled anti-war host Phil Donahue's program in the run-up to the Iraq War, as NBC executives panicked about showcasing even the slightest dissent. And when host Ashleigh Banfield's criticism of pro-war jingoism in the media offended NBC management, according to a May 3 New York Times story, she was demoted and eventually fired. CNN's Jessica Yellin and CBS anchor Katie Couric have both made similar comments about the political climate at MSNBC and NBC. Olbermann himself was not exempted from MSNBC's political pressures. In a 2005 interview with Al Franken, he said: > "You were good enough to come on this newscast with me late in the > summer of 2003. It was August or September. And by coincidence, > either the next day or the day before, Janeane Garofalo had been a > guest on the newscast. And I got called into a vice president's > office here [at NBC and] told, 'Hey, we don't mind you interviewing > these guys, but should you really have put liberals on, on > consecutive nights?' " > Olbermann's criticism of right-wing demagogues at Fox News was one of the key features that made his show one of the most popular in cable news. But at MSNBC, evidently, ratings ultimately are not as important as the interests of its corporate parent. While it's encouraging that Olbermann has made it clear that he intends to continue criticizing Fox where appropriate, what should we make of the silence of his bosses -- the people who, apparently, arranged this "cease-fire"? If GE's journalists indeed have freedom to report the news as they see fit, the company's executives should say so. If not, they should explain how and why they put this policy into effect. From corporation-watch at countercorp.org Tue Aug 11 06:03:27 2009 From: corporation-watch at countercorp.org (Corporation Watch) Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2009 03:03:27 -0700 Subject: [Corp. Watch] U.S. corporations historically eschew truly free markets for pro-business regulations Message-ID: <0A3BEFE9-90C9-41CB-84EC-8320681B4837@countercorp.org> Those Who Control the Past Control the Future By Roderick Long (Art of the Possible blog, Sept. 20, 2008) -- There's a popular historical legend that goes like this: Once upon a time (for this is how stories of this kind should begin), back in the 19th century, the United States economy was almost completely unregulated and laissez- faire. But then there arose a movement to subject business to regulatory restraint in the interests of workers and consumers, a movement that culminated in the presidencies of Wilson and the two Roosevelts. This story comes in both left-wing and right-wing versions, depending on whether the government is seen as heroically rescuing the poor and weak from the rapacious clutches of unrestrained corporate power, or as unfairly imposing burdensome socialistic fetters on peaceful and productive enterprise. But both versions agree on the central narrative: a century of laissez-faire, followed by a flurry of anti-business legislation. Every part of this story is false. To begin with, there never was anything remotely like a period of laissez-faire in American history (at least not if laissez-faire means "let the market operate freely" as opposed to "let the rich and powerful help themselves to other people's property"). The regulatory state was deeply involved from the start, particularly in the banking and currency industries, and in the assignment of property titles to land. (Even land that was not stolen from the natives was seldom appropriated in accordance with any sort of Lockean homesteading principle; instead, vast tracts of unimproved land were simply declared property by barbed wire or legislative fiat.) The early republic's two major political factions -- to oversimplify a bit, call them the Jeffersonians (as represented by the Democrats) and the Hamiltonians (as represented successively by the Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans) -- disagreed primarily about which forms of governmental interference to emphasize. To be sure, both sides paid lip service (and sometimes more than lip service) to the "Principles of '76" -- i.e., the libertarian ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence -- but each side quickly deviated from those principles when doing so served its economic interest. The Hamiltonians, whose chief base of support was in the urban financial centers of the Northeast, called for mercantilist interventions such as subsidies, protectionist tariffs, and central banks. The Jeffersonians, whose chief base of support was rural, including the plantations and the frontier, called for state assistance in extracting labor from slaves and land from Native Americans. In each case, the state ran roughshod over laissez-faire in the interests of a privileged elite. To be sure, the Hamiltonians sometimes offered up good libertarian- sounding defenses of the rights of blacks and Indians, while the Jeffersonians offered up equally libertarian-sounding condemnations of mercantile privilege. But it's relatively costless to take a stand against violations of liberty from which your political opponents are the primary beneficiaries. While 19th-century America was no free market, it was still too free- market for the corporate elite, who accordingly campaigned for government relief against "cut-throat competition." As Adam Smith famously pointed out, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, [without] the conversation end[ing] in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices"; hence the perpetual mercantile quest for monopoly privilege. One especially useful service the state can render the corporate elite is cartel enforcement. Price-fixing agreements are unstable in a free market, because while all parties to the agreement have a collective interest in seeing the agreement generally hold, each has an individual interest in breaking the agreement by underselling the others in order to win away their customers. Even if the cartel manages to maintain discipline over its members, oligopolistic prices tend to attract new competitors into the market. Hence the advantage to business of state-enforced cartelization. Often this is done directly, but there are indirect ways too, such as imposing uniform quality standards that relieve firms from having to compete in quality. (And when the quality standards are set high, lower-quality but cheaper competitors are priced out of the market.) The ability of colossal firms to exploit economies of scale is also limited in a free market, since beyond a certain point the benefits of size (e.g., reduced transaction costs) get outweighed by dis-economies of scale (e.g., calculational chaos stemming from absence of price feedback). That is, unless the state enables large corporations to socialize these costs by immunizing them from competition -- e.g., by imposing fees, licensing requirements, capitalization requirements, and other regulatory burdens that disproportionately impact newer, poorer entrants as opposed to richer, more established firms. The vast regulatory apparatus that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was thus specifically campaigned for by the business community.[1] The supposedly pro-labor legislation that emerged from this era was also mostly bogus, a matter of co-opting labor leaders into a junior partnership with government and business in exchange for not rocking the boat. That this should be so is not terribly surprising; wealthy, concentrated interests are inevitably going to have a greater impact on the political process than poorer and more dispersed ones. (Contrary to popular wisdom, it is only in the market -- where the price system aggregates the preferences of the poorer and more dispersed -- that the latter can systematically trounce the influence of business power.) What is more surprising is that such blatantly pro-business legislation should have been perceived as anti-business. But in the end this is not really all that surprising either: Of course these pro- business "reforms" had to be packaged as anti-business in order for the politicians and their corporate cronies to get away with them. Moreover, many of the instigators appear to have sincerely believed, on ideological grounds, that control of the economy by a government- business partnership was in the best interests of the general populace; and thanks to such partnerships' disproportionate control of the means of information (media and public education), the rest of society could be brought to take a similar view. In addition, because business and government each always want to be the dominant partner, there was inevitably some grumbling in the business community about the precise way in which, for example, FDR advanced their shared corporatist agenda, and this likewise contributed to the misperception of fundamental antagonism. But the historical research cited above indicates that big business has been the chief architect and cheerleader for the regulations that are supposedly designed to restrain its power. Thus, liberals who advocate further regulation in order to combat plutocracy, and libertarians who leap to the defense of the poor embattled corporation, are equally misguided.