From Chapter Eight: the 1980s, Wars, White House & Media Mergers

“The world of corporate takeovers and mergers that was so brazenly outlined in surreal broad strokes by Lumet and Cheyefsky in 1976 became the characteristic feature of the real U.S. media landscape in the 1980s and was actively driven by former actor and President of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan. The rapid emergence of major media conglomerations was promoted and encouraged by the deregulatory rhetoric of the Republican agenda from 1981 to 1989 that across the United States’ economy vowed to get “the government off the backs of the people” by rolling back the New Deal and Great Society agendas of the Roosevelt and Johnson administrations respectively (Sloan, 1999; Friedman, 1995).

The linked rhetoric of freedom for the individual, however, deftly included the legal status of the corporation as an individual in the eyes of the law that rested on favourable leading Right-Wing interpretations of the Constitution. A series of such rulings, that extended back into the 1960s, are summarised thus:

• 1962: Fong Foo vs U.S: Freedom from Double Jeopardy - AMENDMENT UNDER QUESTION: 7

• 1970: Ross vs Bernhard 1970: Jury Trial in a Civil Case - 5^th

• 1976: Virginia Board of Pharmacy vs Virginia Citizens Consumer Council 1976 Commercial Speech- 1^st

• 1978: First National Bank of Boston vs Bellotti 1978 - Political Speech- 1^st

• 1986: Pacific Gas & Electric Co vs Public Utilities Commission- Negative Speech- 1st

(The selection of rulings clarifies the gradual shift towards redefining the scope and substance of the corporation with an increased focus on the First Amendment principles of free speech. (from Nace, 2003, p. 17 see also Peritz, 1996, p. 297)

Another driving ideological motive was the resurgence of a more reactionary America determined to reverse the sense of unease and self-critical enquiry that for many overshadowed the country since the humiliating retreat from Vietnam and the profound impact of the Watergate affair that led to the successful impeachment of Richard Nixon (his attorney was none other than Donald Rumsfeld who would return later in the guise of Secretary of Defense in George W. Bush’s war cabinet of 2003.) Howard Beale’s extended diatribes in Network (1976) were said to voice this sense of national malaise corroding the heart of the Republic.

Broadcasting Free Market 1980s Rhetoric

In the area of actual media regulation, policymakers argued that, with the burgeoning of new media outlets in the form of cable to satellite, the deregulatory process would open the broadcasters to a more competitive market environment where supply and demand was the best measure to evaluate the public interest. A selection of such federal government legislative rulings are given in Table 4 below.

Amongst the more visible changes for cinemagoers was the reversal of the Paramount Decrees that now permitted studios to acquire their own theatres again - thus smoothing the vertical integration process that neatly linked script development to screen exhibition. As Gomery (1998a) puts it,

“During the mid-1980s the major Hollywood studios went on a spending spree, acquiring theaters before the deregulation-minded Ronald Reagan left the White House. In 1986 the Department of Justice quietly agreed not to press the long-time restrictions against theater purchase by Hollywood embedded in antitrust decrees signed 40 years before.” (Gomery, 1998a, p. 141)

SELECTED RULINGS

Key 1980s Regulations for the Communications Industry

• 1982: Removal of anti-trafficking three -year-rule
• 1983: Removal of regulations on children’s advertising
• 1984: Removal of regulations on the length of advertisements
• 1984: Replaces 7-7-7 rule with 12-12-12 rule (TV, Am & FM)*
• 1984: Betamax decision allows home taping
• 1985: Citizens permitted to own satellite dishes
• 1987: Fairness Doctrine abolished
• 1988: FCC reimposes syndicated exclusivity rule

Of the several studios that entered the “spree” we can include one that, since the 1930s, had made significant professional and business associations with Ronald Reagan through owner Lew Wasserman (Sharp, 2003); thus, for Gomery (1998a),

“…the bombshell hit when in January 1986 MCA, parent company of the giant Universal Studios, acquired a major interest in the second largest circuit of theaters in North America, Cineplex Odeon… Once gain, Hollywood’s majors were top powers in the theater end of the business.” (Gomery, 1998a, p. 141)

Media Mergers of the 1980s

Reagan’s FCC signalled a major change in rulings that through the 1980s would support this market model into the 1990s and beyond. During the rolling leadership of Mark Fowler and Dennis Patrick, the FCC would permit the following mergers:

• NewsCorps bought Metromedia (6 television stations) - $1.6 billion

• Turner Broadcasting bought MGM/United Artists - $1.5 billion

• Capital Cities bought ABC television - $3. 5 billion

• General Electric bought RCA - and NBC - $6.4 billion

• National Amusements bought Viacom - $3.4 billion

• Sony bought CBS records - $2 billion

• Time inc. merged with Warner Communications $14.1 billion

• Sony acquired Columbia Pictures & Tri-Star movie studios - $4.8 billion

• Matsushita buys MCA (Universal Studios, Geffen Records & Motown - $6.6 billion

• U.S. West bought a quarter share of Time Warner - $ 2.5 billion

• Viacom bought Paramount Communications - $ 8.3 billion

• Viacom bought Blockbuster - $4. 9 billion

• Cox Cable bought Times Mirror Cable - $2.3 billion

• Westinghouse (CBS) bought Infinity Broadcasting (radio) - $ 4. 9 billion

• NewsCorps bought News World Communications Group. Inc - $3.6 billion

• US West bought a main interest in Continental Cablevision - $10.8 billion

(from Croteau and Hoynes, 2001, p. 75-76)

The rapid and often destabilising corporate changes of the early 1980s coincided with a series of visible changeovers at the networks. At CBS Walter Cronkite was to be replaced by Dan Rather (1981) and in 1983 Tom Browker became lead anchor at NBC, and Peter Jennings, who had anchored from 1964-1967, returned at ABC.

Despite the industry changes, however, the illusion of apparent continuity prevailed: as outlined in Chapter Three, Rather had been with CBS since 1962, and Browker had been first NBC reporter since 1966 and anchor of NBC News Today from 1976-1982 while over at ABC, Canadian Jennings had, in 1964, become the youngest ever news anchor.

Their consistent visible presence, thereafter, would be of valuable rhetorical potency in the decades to come as budgets and staff would be cut, foreign offices disbanded, promotional campaigns ironically expanded, and news credibility gradually diminished. Indeed, the strategic presence of the anchors at the focus of major international events belied the actual curtailment of foreign news coverage and investment by the stations generally.

All the President’s Men - ABC, the CIA and the White House

For watchers of political intrigue, one particular merger - the 1985 acquisition of ABC by Capital Cities - is of some notable interest. In 1954 William Casey, corporate Wall Street lawyer and former wartime manager of OSS (Office of Special Services), became a partner of Capital Cities by buying a block of 51,000 shares which by 1966 were worth $2 million. In subsequent years, Casey would serve in several capacities under Republican President Nixon - as Chair of the Security and Exchange Commission, President of the Import-Export Bank, Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, and member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. By 1981, when his stocks in Capital Cities were valued at $4.7 million, Casey was appointed as the Director of the CIA by President Reagan - the first such Director to sit in Cabinet - and proceeded in that capacity in helping to arrange the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages deal which Reagan would answer for in August 1987. With Lt. Colonel Oliver North, Casey also set up a funding operation for Reagan’s secret war in Central America (Mazzocco, 1994, p. 60-61). In fact one of his first duties after Reagan’s first election victory was to oversee the new President’s 1981 Executive Order 12333,

“…under which the CIA is permitted to operate domestically for the first time in order to collect “significant” foreign intelligence within the United States as long as the effort does not involve spying on the domestic operations of U.S. citizens and corporations.” (Ranelagh, 1986, p. 673).

In his 1987 Los Angeles Weekly article “The Seizing of the American Broadcast Company” Andy Boehm would suggest how Casey was in the position to capitalise on his Washington, D.C. and industry links by driving down the ABC stocks prior to the sale and thereby add to the considerable pressure that was building against ABC President Leonard Goldenson to sell the “poorly managed” broadcast station as a “friendly merger” to Capital Cities - a company oddly three times smaller than the broadcast giant; Warren Buffet for Berkshire Hathaway and major Disney shareholder would underwrite the eventual deal. In support of this contention, Mazzocco argues, is the fact that CIA Director Casey refused to place his Capital City stock of 70,000 shares in a blind trust, and so was able to reap profit $ millions from his investment in the Capital Cities/ABC deal while still Director of the CIA (Mazzocco, 1994, p. 95). The picture shows William Casey with Reagan in the Oval office, Jan, 23rd, 1983.

However, while $ millions of profits were made in Reagan’s cabinet, the situation for the working journalists of the Fourth Estate became increasingly more acute. Batholemew Sparrow (1999) reported from workplace surveys that the decline

“…in newsroom resources has dampened morale in the three major broadcast networks… ABC News, under the cost- cutting of Capital Cities…closed its bureaus in Chicago, Atlanta, St Louis, Miami, Denver, and San Francisco in the late 80s; its employees are “paranoid” and their morale “terrible”.” (Sparrow,1999, p. 87)

The resultant cost-cutting practices of these takeovers on actual news content were immediately palpable both in areas of print and broadcast news and particularly, as we will discuss, in the crucial area of foreign coverage, a fact neatly disguised by the physical presence of globe-trotting anchors whose interviews with world leaders remain significant landmarks in their résumés (Auletta, 1991).

One lurking concern in our account of broadcast news and its representation on film is how the ‘open market’ moves of the 1980s (that ultimately made news divisions more directly accountable to the market and the advertisers) had a determined political agenda that was highly effective in undermining the scope and activities of a ‘radical’ press now peopled by a new generation of critical journalists buoyed from the apparent success of the Washington Post’s Woodward and Bernstein (Redford and Hoffmann) but who would be kept off the backs of both administration at home and the military abroad (Foerstel, 2001).

Towards “Favorable Objectivity” in Peace and War

“In confronting the challenge of international terrorism, the first step is to call things by their proper names, to see clearly and say plainly who the terrorists are, what goals they seek, and which governments support them.” William Casey, speaking while CIA Director and major ABC stockholder. (Livingston, 1994, p. 1)

To assess the changes in foreign affairs reporting in the 1980s and to the present, we need some contextual background that looks briefly back to news coverage of the Vietnam war during the late 1960s and early 1970s that created frissons between the-then administrations of Johnson and Nixon and the news broadcasters. For this we can look to both Chomsky and Herman (1994) and Carpenter (1995), who provide lucid accounts of U.S. television representations of the Vietnam war.

With close reference to Hallin (1986), Chomsky and Herman (1994) convincingly summarise how, contrary to popular assumptions, the U.S. broadcast culture never veered from its initial agreement with the official ideological frame that regarded the war as a valiant, noble and selfless fight against the enemies of democracy. It was only within this overall frame of general complicitness that the profession of news journalism characteristically adopted the more technical angle of questioning critique that focused more on the failure of logistical means rather than any deeper questioning of ideological ends. In support, Carpenter (1995) comments,

“The irony of the government’s campaign to discredit the Saigon “press rebels” was that most of those correspondents were in fact supporters of the war effort.” (Carpenter, 1995, p. 138)

Hallin’s (1986) extensive analysis of news reports and broadcasts reveal the high level of congruence between media and government agendas. However, there remained a powerful perception that the American domestic will to persist in Vietnam was seriously deflated by media representations of the war which seemed counter to the Pentagon world view of Defense Secretary McNamara and Presidents Johnson and Nixon. For example, Edward Jay Epstein in TV Guide vividly recounted how,

“Over the past 10 years, almost nightly, American have witnessed the war in Vietnam, on television… Since television has become the principle - and most believed - source of new for most Americans, it is generally assumed that the constant exposure of this war…was instrumental in shaping public opinion… It has become almost a truism, and the standard rhetoric of television executives, to say that television…caused the disillusionment of Americans with the war… This has been the dominant view of those governing the Nation during the war years.” (in Chomsky and Herman, 1994, p. 199)

An early signal of changes to come emerged from the plains of Des Moines, Iowa earlier in November 1969 where, in a speech penned by Patrick Buchanan, Vice-President Spiro Agnew highlighted a perceived,

““…credibility gap…not in the offices of government in Washington but in the studios of the networks in New York …(and)…a narrow and distorted picture of America often emerges from the televised news”.” (in MacGregor, 1997, p. 133)

Ted Galen Carpenter (1995) contributes a detailed account of how since Vietnam - and across the Republican wars in Grenada (Operation Urgent Fury, 1983), Panama (Operation Just Cause, 1989) and Iraq (Operation Desert Storm, 1991) - the media corporations have, despite largely token individual journalist protest, been willingly seduced into the role of supportive stenographers of Defense Department handouts and staged press conferences. The process, that began with,

“The myth that hostile and unfair media coverage had been a major cause of the defeat in Vietnam festered throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Members of the military hierarchy, as well as conservative political figures, were determined that journalists would never again undermine a U.S. war effort… During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, attempts to intimidate the press or deny coverage of controversial foreign policy actions increased.” (Carpenter, 1995, p. 159)

What seems to have galvanised the Reagan officials was an article by Arthur A. Humphries in the May-June 1983 issue of Naval War College Review. Humphries, a public affairs specialist for the U.S. Navy, focused on three elements, 1. The apparent and perceived failure of the Vietnam war, 2. The success of the U.K. Falklands Campaign of 1982, and 3. the more advanced communications capabilities and world-wide public media audiences increasingly alert to their rights to freedom of information. Looking to (likely) future scenarios involving U.S. military forces abroad Humphries outlined how,

““It is essential that a government and its military branch give regular briefings to representatives of all news organizations, as practicable, in order to sustain a relationship of trust, to foster the flow of correct information, and to halt faulty speculation…the news media can be a successful tool, or even a weapon, in prosecuting a war psychologically, so that the operators don’t have to use their more severe weapons”.” (in Carpenter, 1995, p. 167)

Carpenter (1995) confidently underlines the significance of Humphries’ article. Towards the aim of “favorable objectivity”, news information would be packaged and broadcast coverage would be both assisted but, as a consequence, severely restricted - for the security of the armed forces and the safety of the journalists. The article quickly became,

“…a blueprint for controlling news access to war zones and for managing the news that eventually emerges…and many of its suggestions were put into effect when the United States invaded Grenada. Not all of the elements were implemented, however, until the Persian Gulf War.” (Carpenter, 1995, p. 167)

The emergence of the national ‘pool system’ - which was heavily biased in favour of the main broadcast organisations - helped rationalise a process of filtering (unwanted) journalist access to war zones and ultimately ensured a,

“…news monopoly to members of the mainstream media, who were unlikely to be vehement opponents of America’s interventionist foreign policy. That arrangement greatly benefited the interests of the national security bureaucracy.” (Carpenter, 1995, p. 173)

In its treatment of the press during the Grenada ‘invasion’, (delayed transport and communications services), the Reagan administration translated into active policy the stated preferences that key Pentagon officials such as Humphries had misguidedly harboured against the mainstream media since Vietnam (Carpenter, 1995, p. 163).

Creating the Rhetoric of Victory

The corporate mergers detailed above provide another contextual layer which, combined with the determined effort of the Reagan administration to curtail unwanted press coverage, would neatly synergise with the national security bureaucracy agenda that since has been successful in shaping, packaging and disseminating Humphries’ (1983) “favorable objectivity” in war news coverage. For example, the pressure for broadcasters to compete in the market for decreasing viewers, was, of course, in the interest of the administration since news agencies and individual reporters could not afford not to be included in the pool list or, worse, receive a red card that would deny access to ‘the theatre of operations’. For obvious dramaturgical and commercial purposes, news operations have to show to their respective audiences that their reporters are at the battlefront front or, at the very least, live even if it is from a four-star hotel roof, irrespective of the value of news content being communicated. In the case of Grenada in 1983, therefore, the,

“…lack of meaningful coverage appeared to be precisely what the military wanted. As one CBS producer noted later: “In watching U.S. television of Operation Just Cause, we noticed constant updating of U.S. casualty figures, without mention of Panamanian dead or injured; the playing of stock scenes of heroic American soldiers in helicopter gunships or parachuting onto the beaches but no scenes of hospitals with civilian casualties, the upbeat news conference by President Bush…the constant descriptions of Manuel Noreiga as a voodoo-practicing pervert and drug runner, never as a long-term U.S. ally…”. In short, the military was able to put the proper “spin” on the Panamanian operation and ensure that only a positive, sanitized version of events reached the American people.” (Carpenter, 1995, p. 180)

The plot reversal against the networks that was anticipated in the early 1980s by the Reagan administration began with these staged scenarios of Grenada.

This process would be more finely tuned in the ‘First’ Gulf War of 1991 that was brought to some narrative closure with the daylight retaking of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait City and as performed by the Pentagon. The display proved,

“The point is that television was an important site for the production of consensus and the execution of the war. Indeed, so central has television become to the implementation of foreign policy that the conclusion of the Gulf War was carefully staged to feature the retaking of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait City via helicopter, an inverted image of the chaotic American withdrawal from Saigon in 1974…the figure of the U.S. helicopter hovering over the embassy in victory was intended for a global audience as if to suggest a reversal of the so-called Vietnam syndrome.” (Curtin, 1995, p. 258)

Similar scenarios - with loaded references to Hollywood films and World War Two imagery - would be performed, filmed and broadcast live with the fall of Baghdad itself in the Spring of 2003 (Chapter Nine). More importantly, and considering as we will the 2003 invasion of Iraq in particular, we must ask ourselves how far the degree of successful news management by the ruling administration with a (largely complicit) corporate news broadcasting system increases the likelihood that such military interventions can be confidently planned and executed in the first instance.

Administering News Product - The White House as Studio

The scope of the news journalists’ beat, then, during the 1980s became sharply constrained - both abroad and at home - under straightened newsroom budgets that curtailed extended investigative endeavour in favour of the more immediate flotsam of celebrity news coverage, combative talk shows - or live but staged White House press conferences to which leading star-name journalists are still invited. It was in the interest of the Reagan administration, for example, to provide such events wherein the (televisual) medium quickly became the only message both domestically and abroad:

“Both during the campaign and after the election victory, the Reagan team showed remarkable skill at manipulating media coverage by providing television with an irresistible visual to support “the line of the day”. In this way, they could direct the coverage - at least in visual terms - by making it efficient for the news media to use the visual settings they had orchestrated. The administration even coordinated the 1986 bombing of Libya to coincide with the start of the evening news (Kellner, 1990).” (Croteau and Hoynes, 2000, p. 233)

At the centre of the show, of course, was Ronald Reagan, ‘the Great Communicator’, whose carefully honed skills in presentation since the late 1930s made a virtue out of a ‘natural’, effortless bumbling authenticity. As his own close friend and Chief of Staff Regan (1988) would note how,

“Every moment of every public appearance was scheduled, every word was scripted, every place where Reagan was expected to stand was chalked with toe marks. The President was always being prepared for a performance, and this had the inevitable effect of preserving him from confrontation and the genuine interplay of opinion, question and argument that form the basis of decision.” (Regan, 1988, p. 248)

Indeed, one vivid example of the above was provided in an article for The Washington Post as penned by Reagan’s own media advisor Michael Deaver (1988) who took control of news agendas for a reluctant White House administration by creating televisual mise-en-scenes that would fit neatly into tightened news agendas, hence,

“In our morning issues conference, a meeting much like those held in the editorial offices of newspapers and television networks and stations all over the country, I decided to “lead” with the housing story. But rather than have the White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes hold up charts or issue a press release, and thereby bury the story in the business segment, we took the President to a construction site. There, wearing a hard hat and standing in front of homes under construction, he announced the housing start numbers and what that meant to the American people and the national economy. Naturally, the story played big in the evening news.” (Deaver, The Washington Post. 30.10.1988: C 7)

These disclosures merely confirm commentaries that have underscored the White House press operations (Livingston, 1994). However, by representing him and his staff as mere reactors, Deaver’s article made pains to lay the burden of guilt (if there was any) for the market-led journalism on the broadcasters themselves. The article, entitled “Sound-Bite Campaigning: TV Made Us Do It”, stands as a classic example of fake innocence and ideological deflection.

What emerged during the 1980s, therefore, was a form of market journalism increasingly dependent on the structured programming of created events - from the micro as above, to the macro. The latter would include the sanitised United States invasion of spurious and noticeably light enemies such as Grenada, Panama and then Iraq that were helpfully designed, orchestrated and timed for easy media production and consumption by the administration/studio to the U.S. television audiences (MacGregor, 1997).

Of significant irony, of course, is that while actual investigative news journalism content and scope was being deftly curtailed, the actual level of corporate media executive activity in the form of mergers and acquisitions was vastly increased. The ‘new’ markets that ‘opened’ were to ‘serve’ the needs of the new ‘sovereign’ consumer who, via cable, satellite and the internet advances, quickly became, we are told, information ‘rich’.

Fairness Abolished - From Free Speech to Showing Talk

The frenzied merger activity of the early 1980s, however, needed to pass across the table of the independent Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In this respect, the 1985 acquisition of ABC by the smaller Capital Cities is of particular significance since by that year two of the five FCC commissioners were former Vice-Presidents of Capital Cities - with Mark Fowler already installed by Reagan as the Chair.

The 1986 presidential appointment of Patricia Diaz-Dennis further synergised the long-term interests of corporate media - and ABC/Cap Cities in particular - with the free market ideology of the Reagan administration since Diaz-Dennis was former West Coast Vice-President of Labour Relations with ABC (Mazzocco, 1994, p. 112). The Right-Wing agenda for media deregulation was clearly signalled thereafter in the contest over the Fairness Doctrine that the FCC now felt secure in forwarding. While deregulation of the ownership patterns was having a structural impact on the news broadcasting industry, so media regulators at the FCC took a more direct interventionist stand on the vexed issue of media content.

Amongst those changes that directly impacted on news and current affairs content during this time was the 1987 FCC move to repeal the Fairness Doctrine which, since its appearance in 1949, required broadcasters to devote a “reasonable” amount of time to the discussion - in the form of studio interviews, for example, of community or national issues. A core principle in news content which the Doctrine upheld documented clearly,

“…that such programs be designed so that the public has a reasonable opportunity to hear different opposing positions on the public issues of interest and importance in the community.” (Croteau and Hoynes, 2001, p. 217)

As Croteau and Hoynes (2001) remind us, the Doctrine did not precisely demand or expect a crude division of equal time for opposing views, and definitions of ‘public’ and ‘reasonable’ would hamper its real intent; however, there is a broad consensus of opinion that points out its effectiveness in preventing broadcasters from continually airing only a single view. It stood as an explicit attempt to ensure the coverage of public issues and ensure the adequate coverage of alternative voices about those issues. The move to rescind this rule, however, would be in keeping with the free-market principle of keeping the government off the backs of the people. In response to the FCC repeal of 1987, though, Congress members appeared to counter by making the threatened Doctrine a Federal law. Despite wide acceptance in both the House of Representatives, where the proposal enjoyed a three-to-one margin, and the Senate, where it was accepted by a two-to-one margin, the proposed law was decidedly scuttled by a Reagan veto which upheld the original FCC ruling for rescindment of the Doctrine.

The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine was justified by its pro-market detractors on the questionable grounds that the scarcity argument on which it was founded no longer reflected the reality of mass media use in the 1980s (technology advances bringing wider public access to wider choice of news) and, further, that it curtailed the free expression of ideas (equating the free speech rights of the media corporation with that of a free citizen). The judgment of the FCC, for example, was based,

“…on two main claims: that the Doctrine’s procedures placed unacceptable limits on broadcasters, violating their First Amendment rights, and that it had a ‘chilling effect’ on the reporting of controversies, as editors sought to avoid being drawn into the complexities of expressing balanced views.” (Harvey, 1998, p. 547)

In the light on how these arguments were structured and presented one has liberty to question how natural and innocent was the development of media technologies since the 1970s since it prompted the crucial rhetoric of access that the media giants had sought since the 1920s when the regulatory rulings were put into effect on the grounds of frequency scarcity.

The impact of the 1987 repeal on actual news content will be discussed more fully in our account of Fox News in Chapter Eight; for the present we can briefly register how, during the years since, America has witnessed a fragmentation of voices on its airwaves which in balance favour the free-market ideologies of the corporate state.

As an example, we can measure the sudden emergence of talk-show host Rush Limbaugh who in 1988 was hired from a Sacramento AM radio station by former ABC radio network President Edward McLaughlin to lead the ABC/Capital Cities flagship station WABC (AM) in New York. According to Mazzocco (1994),

“Limbaugh, a vigorous supporter of Reagan’s ultra-conservative vision of a totally privatized corporate America reportedly came to McLaughlin’s attention through industry contacts. The commentator’s spirited, daily defense of Lt. Colonel North, William Casey and the rest of the Reagan administration had begun to attract large conservative audiences in Sacramento during the Senates 1987 Iran - Contra hearings… He blames all of America’s problems on “big spending Democrats, the lazy poor, and trouble-making minority rabble rousers”. As one of the most prominent, unabashed Reagan supporters on the national media stage, he usually delivers the same message: support corporations and the wealthy, cut taxes, make the military stronger, and boost the so-called free-market economy.” (Mazzocco, 1994, p. 136)

From the above we can deduce that the long-lasting impact which the scuttling of the Fairness Doctrine has had on the public debate in America cannot be overestimated. As the scope of debate seems to have narrowed, so, in consequence, the tone of exchange seems to have become more virulent. From their perspective Croteau and Hoynes (2000) were able to reflect on how,

“Since the abandonment of the Fairness Doctine, the FCC no longer requires stations to seriously address issues of public interest. If stations do address public issues, they can now create entire program schedules that communicate a single viewpoint without ever seriously considering alternative opinions… We must also remember that commercial interests drive almost all mass media. It is likely, therefore, that corporate owners of media outlets, unfettered by balance constraints, will feel no need to air the views of consumer advocates and business critics.” (Croteau and Hoynes, 2000, p. 100)

 

Instead, what did emerge across the decade was a paradigm shift in the “talk show” (The Oprah Winfrey Show, 1986, The Jerry Springer Show, 1991, Ricki Lake, 1993). Their co-present mode of production that engineered regular vociferous vocal confrontations between ‘ordinary’ but screened guests seemed to promote the vivid impression that the First Amendment protecting freedom of speech rights was alive and well - but only, it seemed, to be found in the controlled social space of the television studios where interpersonal grievances could be dramatically aired and anchored by the controlling host”

CODA

2007 Update: The following sequence from Outfoxed: Rupert Murdochs War on Journalism (2005)  underlines the consequences that followed the changes in media ownership rules, the abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine of the 1980s. Richard Ailes, Fox News’ first CEO was former White House press aide to Richard Nixon and election manager for Ronald Reagan:-

Where to Now?

How About Corporate Media Beginnings?

• http://wethemedia.edublogs.org/1920s-us-media-beginnings/

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