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Big Media Behaving Badly

The problem with big media is that

America’s biggest media companies are on a roll this month.

Usually fancy new gadgets — not old-school media giants — are the focus of the Consumer Electronics Show. But this year the talk at CES was all about CBS.

On the last day of the big electronics trade show, the technology site CNET was ready to announce its best-of-show awards. The winning gadget was a new digital video recorder (DVR) made by the satellite company DISH.

However, CBS owns CNET, and CBS is in the midst of a messy legal battle with DISH. So at the last minute the DISH DVR disappeared from the awards. In fact, the Vergereported that CBS management forced CNET staff to re-vote on the best gadget award.

At the time, CNET released a statement that suggested CBS’ action reflected an ongoing company policy: “We will no longer be reviewing products manufactured by companies with which we are in litigation with respect to such product.”

This is one of the many problems that arise with huge media conglomerates: They often use business interests as an excuse for interfering with news content.

And sometimes the problem isn’t a company telling newsrooms what they can’t cover, but telling what they must address.

Joe Flint of the L.A. Times recently chronicled two examples of big vertically integrated media companies using their news programs as marketing arms. When Comcast bought NBC, it promised not to meddle with the longtime broadcaster’s news programming. But Flint states that NBC has become “the most aggressive” company when it comes to using news operations to push entertainment offerings.

Flint points to a number of cases in which NBC used Rock Center and Meet the Pressas opportunities to push sitcoms and late-night comedy personalities like Jay Leno. He also notes that increasingly news anchors like Brian Williams are showing up in shows like 30 Rock and the new 1600 Penn. In the end, this only hurts the news, Flint writes: “Not only does it hurt the integrity of the news division, there’s also no proof it helps boost ratings.”

Just days after taking NBC to task, Flint turned his attention to ABC, where Nightlineran an extended feature on the network’s Miss America Pageant. “When it comes to networks risking the credibility of their news units by using them to promote their own entertainment shows,” Flint writes, “that horse left the barn a long time ago. But now the horse is on its fifth lap around the farm.”

Newsrooms today are working with limited resources, Flint argues, and whenever staff time and energy are used to promote sitcoms and pageants it takes resources away from coverage of more important topics and current events.

Here’s the kicker: The media giants discussed here all infringed on their news operations on the same day — Jan. 11. Let’s hope the rest of the year gets better from here.

We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.

As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.

Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.

As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.

At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.

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