The China Syndrome
A funny thing happened during the
Iraq war: many Americans turned to the BBC for their TV news. They were looking
for an alternative point of view something they couldn't find on domestic
networks, which, in the words of the BBC's director general, "wrapped
themselves in the American flag and substituted patriotism for
impartiality."
Leave
aside the rights and wrongs of the war itself, and consider the paradox. The
BBC is owned by the British government, and one might have expected it to
support that government's policies. In fact, however, it tried hard too hard,
its critics say to stay impartial. America's TV networks are privately owned,
yet they behaved like state-run media.
What explains this paradox? It may
have something to do with the China syndrome. No, not the one involving nuclear
reactors the one exhibited by Rupert Murdoch's
In the United States, Mr. Murdoch's
media empire which includes Fox News and The New York Post is known for its
flag-waving patriotism. But all that patriotism didn't stop him from, as a
Fortune article put it, "pandering to China's repressive regime to get his
programming into that vast market." The pandering included dropping the
BBC's World Service which reports news China's government doesn't want
disseminated from his satellite programming, and having his publishing company
cancel the publication of a book critical of the Chinese regime.
Can something like that happen in
this country? Of course it can. Through its policy decisions especially,
though not only, decisions involving media regulation the U.S. government can
reward media companies that please it, punish those that don't. This gives
private networks an incentive to curry favor with those in power. Yet because
the networks aren't government-owned, they aren't subject to the kind of
scrutiny faced by the BBC, which must take care not to seem like a tool of the
ruling party. So we shouldn't be surprised if America's "independent"
television is far more deferential to those in power than the state-run systems
in Britain or for another example Israel.
A recent report by Stephen Labaton
of The Times contained a nice illustration of the U.S. government's ability to
reward media companies that do what it wants. The issue was a proposal by
Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to relax
regulations on media ownership. The proposal, formally presented yesterday, may
be summarized as a plan to let the bigger fish eat more of the smaller fish.
Big media companies will be allowed to have a larger share of the national
market and own more TV stations in any given local market, and many
restrictions on "cross-ownership" owning radio stations, TV
stations and newspapers in the same local market will be lifted.
The plan's defects aside it will
further reduce the diversity of news available to most people what struck me
was the horse-trading involved. One media group wrote to Mr. Powell, dropping
its opposition to part of his plan "in return for favorable commission
action" on another matter. That was indiscreet, but you'd have to be very
naοve not to imagine that there are a lot of implicit quid pro quos out there.
And the implicit trading surely
extends to news content. Imagine a TV news executive considering whether to run
a major story that might damage the Bush administration say, a follow-up on
Senator Bob Graham's charge that a Congressional report on Sept. 11 has been
kept classified because it would raise embarrassing questions about the
administration's performance. Surely it would occur to that executive that the
administration could punish any network running that story.
Meanwhile, both the formal rules
and the codes of ethics that formerly prevented blatant partisanship are gone
or ignored. Neil Cavuto of Fox News is an anchor, not a commentator. Yet after
Baghdad's fall he told "those who opposed the liberation of Iraq" a
large minority that "you were sickening then; you are sickening
now." Fair and balanced.
We don't have censorship in this
country; it's still possible to find different points of view. But we do have a
system in which the major media companies have strong incentives to present the
news in a way that pleases the party in power, and no incentive not to.
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