THE MASS MEDIA

But don't look to the corporate mass media to seek truth about the War on Terrorism or the missing money. Corporate behemoths—be they media or energy or military contractors—share the same status-quo interests as the government, and for the corporate media to broadcast anything that might depart too far from the official government story about 9/11 and its aftermath is simply not in their interest.

But by 2006, as egregious problems caused by the Bush regime became all too obvious, certain elements within the mass media were willing to question Bush's policies, particularly after his unconstitutional spying and support for turning management of important sea ports over to a nation with known terrorist ties. But early on, the mainstream media stood with the government.

For example, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) noted that on October 10, 2001, network executives representing ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and CNN were involved in a conference call with then National Security Adviser and Council on Foreign Relations heavyweight Condoleezza Rice. The executives apparently agreed to limit how and what they would broadcast regarding bin Laden or his al Qaeda group. Bush people even tried unsuccessfully to have al Jazeera, described as the “CNN of the Mideast,” tone down its coverage of bin Laden. When this effort failed, al Jazeera was “accidentally” bombed off the air by US military warplanes.

The Bush administration's effort to block any far-reaching inquiry was even more successful with members of Congress. Free speech was curtailed when they threatened to cut off intelligence reports to legislators who spoke offhandedly to the media. Then White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, already on the record saying Americans “need to watch what they say,” extended this constraint by contacting major newspapers asking that they not print full transcripts of bin Laden's interviews.

According to a FAIR news release, “The point is not that bin Laden or al Qaeda deserve ‘equal time’ on US news broadcasts, but that it is troubling for the government to shape or influence news content. Withholding information from the public is hardly patriotic. When the White House insists that it's dangerous to report a news event ‘in its entirety,’ alarm bells should go off for journalists and the American public alike.”

Another small, but insightful, example of the media glossing over 9/11 issues and questions came on April 18, 2002, when Associated Press writer Sheila Hotchkin reported on the relatives of the victims of Flight 93 who were allowed by the government to listen to cockpit audio tapes from the doomed plane. No reporters were allowed in and the relatives were encouraged not to speak to the media.

But a few did, such as Hamilton Peterson, whose father, Donald A. Peterson, had perished in the crash. In an initial version of the story, Hotchkin quoted Peterson as saying “he learned things from the tape he did not know before, but declined to elaborate.” By the next day, Peterson's observation regarding things he had not known was deleted from news accounts. What did Peterson learn that the rest of us are forbidden to know? Who is behind this mass media control? As noted earlier, the tape was played once again for the jury at the Zacarias Moussaoui trial in April of 2006. A transcript that included English translations of Arabic statements that were alleged to have been made by the hijackers was made available to the public at that time, but the recording itself was withheld.

Particular attention should be paid to the five major corporations, which dominate the American mass media—GE, The Walt Disney Co., Viacom/CBS, News Corp. and Time Warner. This represents a concentration of media power unthinkable prior to the Clinton years.

One of the few members of Congress to address this monopoly of the news media by an increasingly small number of giant corporations was Rep. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont.

“[O]ne of the best-kept secrets is the degree to which a handful of huge corporations control the flow of information in the United States. Whether it is television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books or the Internet, a few giant conglomerates are determining what we see, hear and read,” he said.

During the 1990s, “Telecommunication firms were engaged in the most visible and dramatic drive for corporate alliance and consolidation,” wrote author William Greider in One World, Ready or Not. “AT&T, Time Warner, TCI, MCI, Ameritech and Nynex, CBS, ABC, Disney and many others—the overlapping deals were stunning as US firms rushed to unite market power and technological assets in cable and telephone systems, broadcasting, film-making, publishing and other media, while simultaneously forging telecom partnerships abroad. US consumers would provide the capital for these huge new conglomerates through the deregulated rates they paid to cable and telephone companies. The winners, it was clear, would be a handful of broad and powerful media combines, as dominant as the railroad and oil trusts were in the 1890s.”

In 2005, a Project Censored team researched the board members of 10 major media organizations from newspaper to television to radio. Of these ten organizations, they found there are a mere 118 people sitting on 288 different American and international corporate boards. This study proved the close interlocking of big media and corporate America.

“We found media directors who also were former Senators or Representatives in the House such as Sam Nunn (Disney) and William Cohen (Viacom). Board members served at the FCC such as William Kennard (New York Times) and Dennis FitzSimmons (Tribune Company) showing revolving door relationships with big media and US government officials,” stated the report, adding, “These ten big media organizations are the main source of news for most Americans. Their corporate ties require us to continually scrutinize the quality of their news for bias. Disney owns ABC so we wonder how the board of Disney reacts to negative news about their board of directors’ friends such as Halliburton or Boeing. We see board members with connections to Ford, Kraft, and Kimberly-Clark who employ tens of thousands of Americans. Is it possible that the US workforce receives only the corporate news private companies want them to hear? Do we collectively realize that working people in the US have longer hours, lower pay and fewer benefits than their foreign counterparts? If these companies control the media, they control the dissemination of news turning the First Amendment on its head by protecting corporate interests over people.”

Apart from the corporate concentration of media ownership there is a corporate bureaucracy that rewards mediocrity and conformity while stifling initiative and hard-hitting investigative journalism.

“Much of what is reported as ‘news’ is little more than the uncritical transmission of official opinions to an unsuspecting public,” wrote media critic Michael Parenti.

“What [reporters] pass off as objectivity is just a mindless kind of neutrality,” said journalist Brit Hume, who added reporters “shouldn't try to be objective, they should try to be honest.”

The power of this combined media behemoth is overwhelming.

According to recent studies, the average American spends nearly half of his/her waking hours with some form of the major consumer media—TV, radio, Internet, newspapers, magazines, recorded music, DVDs/VHS tapes, video games and books. It is projected that by the end of 2007 this time spent on media will only increase, mostly on the Net.

Studies in 2006 posted at medialiteracy.com revealed that the typical American spends more than four hours a day watching TV, two and a half hours listening to radio, more than 30 minutes on the Internet, about one hour listening to recorded music and reading newspapers, 20 minutes reading magazines and 17 minutes reading books.

Over and above this increasing consumer usage and ownership consolidation, there is a corresponding decrease in the number of distribution companies, critical to the widespread dissemination of information. Standard & Poor's editors noted that for years distribution problems caused by the consolidation of formerly independent distributors “disrupted deliveries and relationships with retail clients…canceled, missed and late deliveries were common occurrences.” Authors have complained for years that books on controversial subjects always seem to encounter distribution or publicity problems. With an estimated 800 new magazines added each year to the existing 18,000 or so (most fail within the first year), it is easy to understand the importance of distribution.

Major banks, most controlled by secret society members, own significant amounts of stock in the ever-decreasing number of media corporations. “Through elite policy-shaping groups like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Business Roundtable, they steer the ship of state in what they deem to be a financially advantageous direction,” noted authors Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon in 1990. “GE, CapCities, CBS, the New York Times and the Washington Post all have board members who sit on the Council on Foreign Relations.”

Little has changed today. A cursory glance at the Standard & Poor's Corporation Records shows CFR and Trilateral members sit on the boards of the major media corporations.

Corporate ownership intermingled with secret society members, many of whom are employed in the media, may explain why Bilderberg, Trilateral and CFR meetings are not reported by America's “watchdog” media. In fact, the membership lists of these societies read like a “Who's Who” of the mass media.

These members include many past and present media corporate leaders such as Laurence A. Tisch and William Paley of CBS; John F. Welch, Jr., of GE/NBC; Thomas S. Murphy of ABC; Robert McNeil, Jim Lehrer, Hodding Carter III and Daniel Schorr of Public Broadcast Service; Katherine Graham, Harold Anderson and Stanley Swinton of the Associated Press; Michael Posner of Reuters; Joan Ganz Cooney of Children's TV Workshop (Sesame Street); W. Thomas Johnson of CNN; David Gergen of US News & World Report; Richard Gelb, William Scranton, Cyrus Vance, A. M. Rosenthal and Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times; Ralph Davidson, Henry Grunwald, Sol Linowitz and Strobe Talbott of Time; Robert Christopher and Phillip Geyelin of Newsweek; Katherine Graham,

Leonard Downie Jr. and Stephen S. Rosenfeld of the Washington Post; Arnaud de Borchgrave of the Washington Times; Richard Wood, Robert Bartley and Karen House of the Wall Street Journal; William F. Buckley Jr. of National Review and George V. Grune and William G. Bowen of Reader's Digest. Furthermore, sitting on the boards of directors of the corporations, which own the media are multiple secret society members.

Some of the well-known reporters, anchors and columnists who are members of the CFR and/or the Trilateral Commission include Dan Rather, C. C. Collinwood, Diane Sawyer, David Brinkley, Ted Koppel, Barbara Walters, John Chancellor, Marvin Kalb, Daniel Schorr, Joseph Kraft, James Reston, Max Frankel, David Halberstam, Harrison Salisbury, A. Ochs Sulzberger, Sol Linowitz, Nicholas Katzenbach, George Will, Tom Brokaw, Robert McNeil, David Gergen, Mortimer Zuckerman, Georgie Ann Geyer and many others. Small wonder so many researchers see a conspiracy of silence among these media peers.

Then there are “media watchdog” organizations such as Accuracy in Media (AIM). Many persons assume such groups are watching out for the public's interests. Not according to writer Michael Collins Piper, who in 1990 made public that AIM founder Reed Irvine was paid $37,000 a year as an “adviser for the division of international finance” of the Federal Reserve System. Noting that many Fed members also belong to the secret societies, Piper wrote, “To this day, Irvine and AIM never touch on any subject which is sensitive to the interests of the international Establishment: whether it be the Bilderberger group, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations or the truth about the privately owned Federal Reserve.”

There are also choke points within the flow of information, such as the international desk at Associated Press headquarters in New York where one person decides what news from outside the United States makes it onto the wire service. It is important to understand that the real control over the mass media is not direct control over the thousands of hard-working editors, reporters and news directors throughout the nation, but rather the control over the distribution of the information. If one doesn't see or hear about a story, to them it didn't happen.

Then there is the tremendous pressure created by fear of job security and loss of sources. Many national columnists must rely on insider sources to provide juicy information. Much of this information comes from government sources, which would dry up if they published the wrong story. Even the more hard-hitting national reporters still must pull their punches if they want to maintain their insider sources.

The ever-concentrated corporate ownership of the media has meant objective news, long viewed as a public service, flies out the window in favor of bottom-line profits based on ratings. At the time of the JFK assassination, the three major TV networks—ABC, CBS and NBC—supported their news departments with public service funds. Today, these same news departments are funded as programming with a resultant concern over ratings. News today is “a kind of commodity in the marketplace, no longer a holy profession,” commented former CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr, “Today, it doesn't matter anymore. You just make your money and to hell with public service.”

Veteran newsman Walter Cronkite agreed. Quoted in a professional journal, he said the current state of television journalism is “disastrous and dangerous” and decried “unreasonable profits…to satisfy shareholders.” “[I]n demanding a profit similar to that of the entertainment area, they're dragging us all down.”