Violence for Profit,

Manufacturing Fear

excerpted from the book

The Perpetual Prisoner Machine

How America Profits From Crime

by Joel Dyer

Westview Press, 2001, paper

p57
George Seldes, journalist, from the The George Seldes Reader

What is the most powerful force in America today?

Answer: Public opinion.

What makes public opinion?

Answer: The main force is the press.

Can you trust the press?

Answer: The baseball scores are always correct (except for the typographical error now and then). The stock market tables are correct (within the same limitation). But when it comes to news which will affect you, your daily life, your job, your relation to other peoples, your thinking on economic and social problems, and, more important today, your going to war and risking your life for a great ideal, then you cannot trust about 98 percent (or perhaps 99 1/2 percent) of the big newspaper and big magazine press in America.

But why can t you trust the press?

Answer: Because it has become big business. The big city press and the big magazines have become commercialized, or big business organizations, run with no other motive than profit for owner or stockholder (although hypocritically still maintaining the old American tradition of guiding and enlightening the people).

p58
Walter Cronkite

"Nearly every important publishing and broadcasting company today is caught up in the plague of the nineties that has swept the business world-the stockholder demand to increase profits.... Adequate profits are clearly necessary for survival, but stockholders in too many cases demand superprofits. Compliant managements play the game that stock value is the only criterion of success. In the news business, that isn't good enough. The lack of a sense of public service begins today with the ownership of too many newspapers and broadcasting companies-that is, the stockholders. Stewardship of our free press is a public service and a heavy responsibility It should not be treated the same as the manufacture of bobby pins, or of automobiles."

p63
According to news director Bob Suren:

"If the product is unappealing, just as in any other business, news organizations have to adapt by reorganizing, realigning, or terminating operations. Newspapers have to sell newspapers, sell ad space. They are not public utilities. They are businesses. We are in a business and I believe that you do what you have to do, legally, ethically, to get folks to watch your show.... We are owned by people who want to make money: they really don't care if I lead with a murder or not; they just want to know if anyone was watching."

p63
1967 study - Crime and Publicity by A. Friendly and R. L. Goldfarb

"In a competitive situation where there are bound to be occasional and continual battles for readers and revenue, the usual weaponry is the reporting of crime." And it's not just any crimes; sensational violent crimes are the ones that have been found to increase ratings and revenues the most.

p63
Numerous studies have documented that violent-crime coverage increases the number of viewers and readers for a TV station or newspaper.

p64
In the 1991 book Good Murders and Bad Murders, author W. Wilson described the use of murder as a means to profit by the media. "The information market for murder thrives, and the media respond to that market as would any entrepreneur." Such sensational crimes contain "the intensity of drama, the centerpiece of a true crime story, the remote tragedy of a terrorist attack, and the sardonic humor of a grade B movie.

More often than not, when a particularly gruesome murder occurs, it quickly becomes a lead story for news organizations, both local and national. Professor Steven Chermak of the Department of Criminal Justice at Indiana University at Bloomington has described such stones as "super primary" because "[n]ews organizations are willing to commit a larger number of financial and personnel resources to [these] stories because of their ability to attract more consumers." So can one type of murder actually generate more profit than another for the media? Definitely.

Consider the tragic 1999 school shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, where thirteen students died at the hands of two fellow classmates armed with homemade bombs, rifles, and a semiautomatic pistol, who later committed suicide themselves. First of all, let me say that this tragedy did deserve to be the lead story on the national news for at least one day and possibly several more. But as is increasingly the norm in the 1990s, the Columbine story was milked for every dollar it could generate by the media for no less than eight full weeks following the incident. The Today Show did a live broadcast from the scene of the crime. Barbara Walters of 20/20 immediately jumped into the fray. In fact, every morning show and news magazine devoted major time to Columbine, as did the pseudo-news programs like Hardcopy, the network news, and the cable news programs.

As a result of the unprecedented saturation coverage allotted the Columbine tragedy, viewers all across the nation were exposed to every emotional nuance the case had to offer. We watched the murders unfold live on cable news programs and the networks for nearly a full day. We then saw the most sensational scenes repeated again and again over the next few weeks in segments interspersed with tearful interviews with grieving students, parents, teachers, and community leaders. Then came the days of expert opinion-interviews with a wide array of professionals from law enforcement to child psychology. Cameras looked on as celebrities such as the duchess of York and survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing made their way to the makeshift memorial of flowers and memorabilia located in the park next to the school. Television cameras took us inside the bedrooms of the young victims, where we saw their favorite stuffed toys and their sports trophies. Grieving parents told us about their lost child's favorite foods and hobbies-about bright futures that would never be realized. And finally, we attended every single tear-filled funeral via television.

In all, the Columbine tragedy generated hundreds upon hundreds of hours of media coverage. So why were we exposed to so much emotional footage of this event? I find the answer to this question most disturbing. The answer is: because the Columbine tragedy is the kind of story that can generate tens of millions of dollars in advertising revenues. Ratings for cable stations and other news programming skyrocketed during the sensationalized Columbine barrage ... a single rating point can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to a station, and we're talking about much more than one point here.

In the saturation coverage during the week following the shooting audience ratings for Fox News Channel were up an incredible 59 percent in total households over the previous week. CNN had a 41 percent ratings gain during the same period, with a 52 percent gain in prime time. MSNBC increased its ratings by 46 to 56 percent depending on the time of day, and CNBC improved its ratings by 34 percent during prime time. Although cable programs had the biggest ratings increases the networks also experienced incredible gains. NBC's Nightly News increased its total audience share by 11 percent with coverage of the tragedy. ABC, World News Tonight was up 3 percent and even lowly CBS showed an increased audience share on the nightly news. In short Columbine was big business for the corporations that own the airways.

p67
In his book Victims in the News: Crime and the American News Media, Chermak summed up the media's increasing reliance on crime. In his words:

It is important to accept that these organizations are private businesses producing news to make a profit for their owners.... Crime delivered through any medium capitalizes on the public's fascination with gore and pathos.... Crime stories provide real life drama and entertainment that can stir a host of emotions for different audience members.

The decision by media corporations to disseminate a disproportionate amount of violent content because it will draw large audiences and thereby please advertisers has become a powerful constraint on the information flow, as was predicted by Supreme Court Justice William Brennan in 1964 when he said:

Clearly, the threat of censorship is no longer limited to state control. Private economic forces have ushered in another kind of censorship, one generally beyond the reach of the First Amendment. Like its government counterpart, censorship by advertisers denies the public access to knowledge that is crucial for making informed political and economic choices.

The control, or censorship, as Brennan put it, that advertisers exert over content has escalated dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s. A 1992 report issued by the Center for the Study of Commercialism titled Dictating Content documented more than sixty instances where advertisers censored news stories.

p69
the CEO of the network-owning Westinghouse in an interview in Advertising Age magazine

"We are here to serve advertisers. That is our raison d'etre."

p70
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's faith in the free market tended to express itself in an exuberance for ignoring the antitrust laws. Reagan did for the media industry then what he did for virtually all industries: He deregulated it to some degree. Reagan made it possible for the networks to own nearly twice as many television stations as they had previously been allowed to by law.

I'm not just picking on conservatives here. What Reagan started, Bill Clinton has perfected. Under Clinton, America has had more corporate mergers than ever before in its history. There were a record-breaking 1,471 mergers in 1996, and 1998 mergers are expected to shatter that mark with the meshing of $1.61 trillion worth of corporations. Democrat Clinton has also proven to be just as enthusiastic about media mergers as Reagan. Not only did he sign the monopoly-friendly 1996 Telecommunications Act, but it was on Clinton's watch that Disney took over ABC in what billionaire Warren Buffett, ABC's major shareholder, has described as the merging of the number-one content provider with the number-one distributor in the industry. In other words, ABC-Disney was exactly the type of corporate marriage were designed to stop.

Just in case anyone is still in denial with regard to the demise of the antitrust laws, the 1998 announcement of the merger between oil giants Exxon and Mobil should snap you back to reality. Not only will this merger create the largest corporation in the world, but ironically, it re-unites two of the companies created when the antitrust laws forced the ' breakup of Rockefeller's Standard Oil monopoly a century ago. We have truly come full circle.

As a consequence of consolidation in the media industry, the number of daily newspapers in the United States by 1993 had plummeted to 1,700. Of those remaining papers, 98 percent had local monopolies over their market, and only fifteen corporations controlled the vast majority of those papers. Other sectors of the media have followed the same consolidation plan. Time, Inc. now controls 40 percent of the magazine industry; Cap Cities-Disney, GE, Time Warner, and Viacom (provided its pending purchase of CBS goes through) now own the vast majority of the television airwaves in this country; and even the hallowed book industry has become owned and controlled by fewer than a dozen companies.

In 1982, when Ben Bagdikian wrote his startling book The Media Monopoly, only fifty corporations controlled over half of the entire media business in the United States. By 1986, when he completed his first revision of the book, Bagdikian found that only twenty-six corporations controlled over half of the media empire. In 1993, when he completed his book's next update, Bagdikian reported that the number of corporations controlling the majority of the media in the United States was down to twenty. So what has happened since then? As of 1998, there are only nine corporations that now control the majority of media content on the entire planet.

The world's flow of information is now dominated by Time Warner (1997 sales $24 billion), Disney ($22 billion), Bertelsmann ($15 billion) Viacom ($13 billion), News Corporation ($11 billion), TCI ($7 billion), General Electric ($5 billion), Sony ($9 billion), and Seagram ($7 billion). In addition to these nine, there is a somewhat less powerful second tier of global media corporations composed of approximately three dozen companies, including Westinghouse, Comstat, Gannett, and New York Times Company, that split the remaining global market.

p72
In the late 1980s, a journalist friend of mine in Portland, Oregon, had a Russian guest staying in his home. One night, while the two were watching the evening news, my friend noticed that the Russian was flipping back and forth between the networks with a perplexed look on his face. Puzzled by the behavior, my friend asked him what was wrong. The man responded with a question of his own, "Who controls your news?" A little more dialogue revealed the true nature of the inquiry.

As he flipped from channel to channel, the man from Russia was astonished to find that each station was offering nearly identical coverage of the exact same events. He couldn't understand how this uniformed information flow could exist in our country because he was under the impression that the United States had a free press. He went on to explain that in Russia, all the stations also carried the exact same news, but it was because the government controlled the programming. When he saw the carbon-copy newscasts of ABC, NBC, and CBS, it was therefore only natural that he would assume that one entity was in control of America's networks as well.

... The government isn't pulling the strings of the nightly news, but it does appear that someone or something is making the flow of information not only incredibly uniform but also incredibly violent. The fact that so few now own so much of all news content translates into a very few people, literally a handful of people, making the decisions over "what is news" for the majority of the entire industry. And since the power of shareholder primacy guarantees that each of these executives is committed to the identical goal of producing the content that will generate the maximum profit for his or her company, it follows that news content would become relatively uniform, with an emphasis on cheap-to-produce violence that draws a large audience.

p73
movie director Oliver Stone:

As news organizations are increasingly driven by a bottom-line mentality, the news we get becomes more and more sensational. What is the difference between Time and Newsweek? Between ABC, NBC, and CBS News? Between the Washington Post and the New York Times? For all practical purposes, none. The concentration of media power means that Americans increasingly get their information from a few sources who decide what is "news.

p73
This not-so-subtle shift from important information to profitable information in the "what-is-news" equation has led to news programming that has, for all intents and purposes, become as controlled by the shareholder's profit demands as the Russian press once was by that country's Communist regime. And because most "sensational" stories result from crime and violence, it stands to reason that the majority of what we have called news in the 1980s and 1990s has been composed of scenes of bloody carnage. And it's not just news content that has become more violent in the last twenty years. As a result of consolidation and globalization, the majority of all media content is now composed of violence as well, including nearly two-thirds of all entertainment content.

McChesney's take on this was:

"A specter now haunts the world, a global commercial media system dominated by a small number of super-powerful, mostly U.S.-based transnational media corporations. It is a system that works to advance the cause of the global market and promote commercial values, while denigrating journalism and culture not conducive to the immediate bottom line or long-run corporate interests. It is a disaster for anything but the most superficial notion of democracy-a democracy where, to paraphrase John Jay's maxim, those who own the world ought to govern it."

p77
Carl Bernstein, speaking before the Jewish Federation, February 23, l999

"I believe it s the role of journalists to challenge people, not to just mindlessly amuse them.... American journalism is disfigured by celebrity, gossip, and sensationalism. In this culture of journalistic titillation, we teach our readers and our viewers that the trivial is important.

***

Manufacturing Fear
p83
Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, 1978
In one generation . . America has become the first culture to have substituted secondary, mediated versions of experience for direct experience of the world. lnterpretations and representations of the world were being accepted as experience, and the difference between the two was obscure to most of us.

p83
George Gerbner, Annenberg School of Communications, University of Pennsylvania
"Whoever tells most of the stories to most of the people most of the time has effectively assumed the cultural role of parent and school."

p83
... in the l990s ... the nine supercorporations that control the majority of the media that have primarily assumed the important societal role of storyteller.

p85
Television has literally become a centralized system that creates a shared consciousness that fulfills the societal role previously held by organized religion.

p107
George Gerbner, Annenberg School of Communications, University of Pennsylvania
"Our studies have shown that growing up from infancy with this unprecedented diet of violence has three consequences, which, in combination, I call the "mean world syndrome. What this means is that if you are growing up in a home where there is more than, say, three hours of television per day, for all practical purposes you live in a meaner world - and act accordingly-than your next-door neighbor who lives in the same world but watches less television. The programming reinforces the worst fears and apprehensions and paranoia of people.

The Perpetual Prisoner Machine

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