Vested interests in the Media

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EDITOR SLAMS EXPRESS MEDDLING. The editor of a national newspaper has launched a withering attack on his proprietor for interfering in editorial decisions. Sunday Express editor Michael Pilgrim stated: “I have been asked on several occasions to suppress evidence of wrongdoing. I have been asked to suppress stories for commercial reasons which have not in the slightest benefited the newspaper… Activity such as this harms my reputation, harms the newspaper’s reputation and eventually harms your reputation. When I took over, I was told that editors edit. Now the situation is very different.” Observer Newspapers, 20th May, 2001

Wendy Grossman, writes as follows for Intellectual Capital on the recent multi-billion-dollar merger between Time Inc. and AOL, 20th Jan, 2000 in an article entitled 'Dangerous Liaisons.' “What disturbs me about these scenarios is the concentration of media into too few, extremely powerful hands. The danger is not so much that all media will express the same opinions; people are quite capable of reading an opinion and disagreeing with it. The danger is that certain kinds of stories simply will not get covered - and despite the Internet's capacity for lengthy, detailed exposes of all types, most people derive their sense of what today's important issues are from the major media.”

“Like almost everything else on television, news programmes leave us feeling bereft of control over our own lives. They report with certainty what has happened through the eyes and mouths of the most powerful groups in society. Except for some inevitable exceptions, the news is rarely news, but a presentation of the virtual consensus decreed by the most powerful. The news is brought to us like a meal in a restaurant; we question the way it is served only when we find the content distasteful…. We the public, in all our diversity, have struck a contract with our governors: realising that life is short, we refrain from criticising or disturbing consensus as long as it does not disturb us, and that we are left alone to be ourselves.” Martin Walker “Totalitarian Science and Media Politics,” Continuum, Vol 5, No 5, January 1999

“We are going to impose our agenda on the coverage, by dealing with the issues and subjects that we choose to deal with.” Richard M Cohen, senior producer of CBS Political News

“Our job is to give not what they want, but what we decide.” Richard Salent, former president of CBS

"The mainstream media... has failed us completely, here in the UK and in the USA. Any news on the pharmaceutical industries is just too damned uncomfortable to handle; too complicated, often deliberately, too scientific for the layman. Many hacks, who should know better, have been lunched, holidayed and bamboozled into silence.” John le Carré, Spectator Magazine, December 2000

“There is no such thing in America, in world history, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinion to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this - toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.” John Swinton, former editor of The New York Times, addressing fellow colleagues at the New York Press Club.