It's hard to say which is worse: the ethics or the corporations. I agree with londie that there should be more "holding individual journalists" accountable. but i wonder about the guys we don't see, the intentions we don't hear about from the corporations. it's all about money, cuz that's what keeps 'em going...and really, if someone's paycheck is bigger than all the others' and all that's required to get that paycheck is a slight blanketed bias, then why not take it? who cares about the public and whether or not they get all the info as long as i've got mine. that tends to be the nature of buisness. what can create that altruism needed, that golden idea of truth-seeking, 'care about the people' journalism? the journalists are supposed to take on that role, but they gotta get paid too. so, i dunno which is the main player (journalists or private ownership). i suppose it depends on where the money's coming from.

I choose to use a New York Times article entitled “Fewer uninsured kids in the U.S.”, published Sunday. I actually winced when reading this article, nothing could be further from the truth. This is indeed a national article, but one can hardly talk about the uninsured without talking about Texas. Additionally, as a huge state with a complex bureaucracy that has proven unable to provide ample resources for it’s masses, Texas could very well be the very vision of a national healthcare program. As such, it makes sense for Texas to be mentioned throughout the article, and to also mention the pitfalls of children’s insurance in the state.

In 2003, the 78th Texas Legislature dramatically cut the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), deeming visual, dental, and mental health coverage as ‘frivolous’. There was horrendous backlash from all of this, actually enough for the 79th Lege to re-instate CHIP. What does the article say about CHIP in Texas and the fury of controversy that surrounds it? “The picture is somewhat brighter for children than for adults in large part because of enactment of the State Children's Health Insurance Program in 1997.” It doesn’t mention that Texas is the most uninsured state. It fails to note that the Texas Lege has been assailing the CHIP for the last 4 years. And it doesn’t inform the readers that Texas currently ranks 49th nationally in healthcare spending per capita.

While the utter lack of objectivity in this story appalling, I sense something else is going on here. The Bush Administration has been advocating a ‘pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps’ method of dealing with those hovering around the poverty line in the United States. Temporary Assistance to Needy Families has been cut again and again. Welfare-to-Work programs have been show to exploit those who apply to the program, and not provide applicants with the $$$ needed to survive. Given this information, it’s not hard to believe that this lack of information, or misinformation, is the work of a large media corporation. The New York Times Company, with 3.3 Billion in its coffers, is a conglomerate that owns more than 15 newspapers. A target that big could use a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card from the feds, or could do with being endorsed as ‘fair and balanced’ by a slew of D.C. fat cats. Or could use more embedded reporters in Iraq, or an advance on press releases issued by the White House.

There’s a very good ole boy feeling to all of it; we scratch your back, so you’d better scratch ours. I do believe that McChesney and Nicols get it right in saying that in order to gain favor, and therefore considerable rewards from the government, media will print favorable coverage—dumbing down media at large and thus the public.

In reference to the above post, I tend towards Schudson's view, and blame journalistic ethics rather than corporations. The reason for this is because since reading Mcchesney and Nichols I have often wondered how their claim (in this instance, that CNN covered the Iraq invasion from the government's perspective) plays out in real life. How exactly does CNN control what Wolf Blitzer says? I imagine it is at the levels of high/mid management and producers of individual shows that the general perspective decisions are made (if any). But, Is it the case that a perspective just filters down unchallenged from from the higher ups straight to the journalists? Maybe it is naive, but I think there must be at least a little room for dissent at the journalist-level, especially for big name "journalists" like wolf blizter.

I think that CNN's coverage of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq is a good example of how private ownership of the media led CNN to report in favor of the government so that the FCC would deregulate ownership laws for them. What persuades me that CNN was, in fact, trying to curry favor with government officials is the coincidental timing of a change in corporate media ownership policy and Iraqi war coverage. In early March 2003, the FCC held a public hearing on the proposed changes to FCC regulations, which would make media ownership rules more lax.

Granting that the hearings on ownership rules only coincidentally occurred around the same time that the U.S. invaded Iraq, one could reasonably argue that the Time Warner Company (which owns CNN) along with other big media corporations had increased incentive to cover the government perspective of the war favorably. The Time Warner Company had much to gain from the changes proposed (such as the repeal of the law that prevented companies from owning television stations that serve more than 35% of the population.

Thus, CNN wanting to maintain good ties with the administration and needing to cheaply produce war coverage to compete with other news sources, chose to cover the war in a light that brought the suggestion of Iraq’s ownership of weapons of mass destruction into prominence. A skewed emphasis on the possibility that Iraq, indeed possessed weapons and the suggestion of the country’s rogue-like intentions for the use of these weapons, led CNN to marginalize alternative assessments of the situations (e.g. that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, or that invastion was not necessary). Overall, this narrowing of perspectives and sheer dominance of one political lens cost the American public the possibility of rich deliberation over the policy of preemptive war.

For instance, in a special edition of “CNN Wolf Blitzer Reports,” CNN analyzes President Bush’s address to the nation about the war with an obvious bias toward the assumption that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. Wolf Blitzer and other reporters’ commentary on the address focused entirely on this assumption. During the dialogue, Blitzer reaffirms that the president’s articulated themes were “[n]ot only disarmament, getting rid of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, but also regime change.” The broadcast proceeds to cover analysis of the Iraq war, but all the perspectives offered are in line with the assumption that weapons of mass destruction exist. Though we get to hear British Secretary Jack Straw and retired Brigade General David Grange discuss the issue, we hear no expert or official opinion discussing the opposing view point. CNN did not pay their reporters to do investigative work and present the critical perspectives involved in the debate over WMDs--coverage was largely limited to what officials said. The theme of this show represented a broader trend within CNN’s coverage of failing to adequately represent multiple perspectives on Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.

This trend is interesting because of the fact that the Iraq Survey Group, a fact-finding commission sent to Iraq after the 2003 invasion, found in their final report that there were no weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. officially banned its search for weapons of mass destruction in January 2005, and up to the present there have been no discoveries of such weapons in Iraq. Given this outcome, it was arguably reasonable for CNN to have presented the perspective that no weapons existed. So why would it choose not to? Precisely because, as McChesney and Nichols argue, CNN needed to keep costs low (rely heavily on official sources) and maintain favor with the government (cover the invasion from the government's perspective).