The Four Ponies of Perdition: How Media Concentration Bans Local Experts
By Craig B Hulet
August 3, 2003
In a recent commentary William Safire wrote that “On the domestic front, President Bush is backing into a buzz saw. The sleeper issue is media giantism. People are beginning to grasp and resent the attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to allow the Four Horsemen of Big Media - Viacom (CBS, UPN), Disney (ABC), Murdoch's News Corporation (Fox) and G.E. (NBC) - to gobble up every independent station in sight.”
It couldn’t be more apt for Safire to use the Four Horsemen as metaphor; drawing on an apocalyptic one makes it even more so. What does Corporatism desire within its ideological system? to achieve and protect Empire the media outlets must be controlled as much as possible by the power elite (to use a socio/cultural term coined by C. Wright Mills in the fifties). That an elite exist is never discussed openly in the mainstream media, even when a self-appointed one like Paul Wolfowitz refers to himself and his small circle of friends as “a Cabal,” while true, only he can smugly state it as such. If you or I were to state it we are automatically smeared as a conspiracy theorist; which is also a euphemism for anti-Semite. One such elitist is Secretary of State Colin Powell’s son Michael Powell, who as head of the FCC which made the recent ruling Safire discussed, has stated that the further media concentration in the hands of the four horsemen would “guarrantee localism, diversity, competition and fairness.”(?) To allow one media giant to own up to 45 percent of a market, owing newspapers, television stations , cable and radio stations, not to mention their clout on the Internet, is going to dispense diversity? Create competition? Economics 101 dispels these myths too easily.
What we are already seeing is the media caving in to syndication programming; drive 100 miles in any direction, listen to ten different radio stations and you hear Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage until the hair on the nap of your neck gives warning that there are predators afoot. Should you stumble upon one of the local non-syndicated, or barely syndicated hosts in a market, they are discussing the importance of using caution at the tanning salon, whether biscuits and gravy cause arterial discomfort, and little Penny Pennpacker’s pet poodle was pounced upon by a panther prowling the park. That is to say, the local hosts are quietly quite systematically being forced into doing only local programming in any market, leaving the “important” issues of the day, like the warmongering of the Washington Cabal, to the likes of Sean Hannity! Hannity, who asks the question on what “authority” does Susan Sarandon speak out against the President, by what “expertise” does this rich actress have an opinion at all. Nobody thinks to ask by what “authority and expertise” does Hannity endorse the President’s every word and deed? Indeed? This very rich entertainer, and that is all Hannity, O’Reilly, Limbaugh and Savage are, “entertainers” just like Susan, the four ponies of perdition. They have little expertise in any area of importance with the obvious exception of self-aggrandizement, self-proclaimed self-importance and their own hifalutin air of superiority as corporate whores.
I could even do that if Susan couldn’t do it well enough. But some of us choose to actually be expert at some one thing or another. How does one gain the reputation as expert in some area? By being consistently correct, predictably proficient, by sticking one’s neck out and making statements that seem an awful lot like warnings. That is to say, by issuing a caveat consistently correct before the event runs its course, making the case before-hand, not commenting by rote what’s reported in the news. That is what, and this is all the four ponies do every day, rubber-stamping the White House press releases and shouting done anyone that disagrees.
But the four ponies are much needed to protect the Four Horsemen which every couch tater knows all-too-well. The four ponies will not interview any expert that disagrees with them, let alone disagrees with the corporate policies of empire. Indeed, the Four Horsemen are the sturdy limbs of empire as this has always been throughout the ages. The four ponies are the sorry steeds which carry the malignant message. The local ponies are put to pasture, or turned into groveling dogs, they too do not interview the nationally known expert who lives locally in the same state, or even town as his issues are now of little importance to “local programming.” the local dogs in other towns must do the same with the added ingredient that “he” isn’t a local expert, so he cannot be interviewed because, as the redneck Hannitys and the Hatfields would say “he ain’t from around here”! Diversity has already gone out the window with this trend. Should the FCC ruling stand, and Mr. Bush veto the bill from the House and Senate noted below, this trend will become irreversible.
Here is what the Senate Commerce Committee has done: reflecting the widespread worry, that the Four Horsemen will gobble-up everything in sight, Safire reported:
...the Senate Commerce Committee voted last month to send to the floor Ted Stevens’s bill rolling back the F.C.C.‘s anything-goes ruling. It would reinstate current limits and also deny newspaper chains the domination of local TV and radio.... The Four Horsemen were confident they could get Bush to suppress a similar revolt in the House, where G.O.P. discipline is stricter. When liberals and conservatives of both parties in the House surprised them by passing a rollback amendment to an Appropriations Committee bill, the Bush administration issued what bureaucrats call a SAP - a written Statement of Administration Policy. It was the sappiest SAP of the Bush era. “If this amendment were contained in the final legislation presented to the President,” warned the administration letter, “his senior advisers would recommend that he veto the bill.”
The SAP was signed by the brand-new director of the Office of Management and Budget, Joshua Bolten, but the hand was the hand of Stephen Friedman, the former investment banker now heading the president's National Economic Council. Reached late yesterday, Friedman forthrightly made his case that the F.C.C. was an independent agency that had followed the rules laid down by the courts. He told me that Bush's senior advisers had focused on the question "Can you eliminate excessive regulation and have diversity and competition?" and found the answer to be yes. He added with candor: "The politics I'm still getting an education on."
The Bush veto threat would deny funding to the Commerce, State and Justice Departments, not to mention the federal judiciary. It would discombobulate Congress and disserve the public for months. And to what end? To turn what we used to call “public airwaves” into private fiefs, to undermine diversity of opinion and - in its anti-federalist homogenization of our varied culture - to sweep aside local interests and community standards of taste.
This would be Bush's first veto. Is this the misbegotten principle on which he wants to take a stand? At one of the White House meetings that decided on the SAP approach, someone delicately suggested that such a veto of the giants' power grab might pose "a communications issue" for the president (no play on words intended). Friedman blew that objection away. The SAP threat was delivered.
In the House this week, allies of the Four Horsemen distributed a point sheet drawn from Viacom and Murdoch arguments and asked colleagues to sign a cover letter reading, "The undersigned members . . . will vote to sustain a Presidential veto of legislation overturning or delaying . . . the decision of the FCC . . . regarding media ownership."
But they couldn't obtain the signatures of anywhere near one-third of the House members - the portion needed to stop an override. Yesterday afternoon, the comprehensive bill - including an F.C.C. rollback - passed by a vote of 400 to 21.
If Bush wishes to carry out the veto threat, he'll pick up a bunch of diehards (now called "dead-enders"), but he will risk suffering an unnecessary humiliation. What next? Much depends on who is chosen to go into the Senate-House conference. If the White House can't stop the rollback there, will Bush carry out the ill-considered threat? Sometimes you put the veto gun back in the holster. The way out: a president can always decide to turn down the recommendation of his senior advisers.
(Source: Washington, Bush's Four Horsemen By William Safire 7/24/03)
By Craig B Hulet
August 3, 2003
In a recent commentary William Safire wrote that “On the domestic front, President Bush is backing into a buzz saw. The sleeper issue is media giantism. People are beginning to grasp and resent the attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to allow the Four Horsemen of Big Media - Viacom (CBS, UPN), Disney (ABC), Murdoch's News Corporation (Fox) and G.E. (NBC) - to gobble up every independent station in sight.”
It couldn’t be more apt for Safire to use the Four Horsemen as metaphor; drawing on an apocalyptic one makes it even more so. What does Corporatism desire within its ideological system? to achieve and protect Empire the media outlets must be controlled as much as possible by the power elite (to use a socio/cultural term coined by C. Wright Mills in the fifties). That an elite exist is never discussed openly in the mainstream media, even when a self-appointed one like Paul Wolfowitz refers to himself and his small circle of friends as “a Cabal,” while true, only he can smugly state it as such. If you or I were to state it we are automatically smeared as a conspiracy theorist; which is also a euphemism for anti-Semite. One such elitist is Secretary of State Colin Powell’s son Michael Powell, who as head of the FCC which made the recent ruling Safire discussed, has stated that the further media concentration in the hands of the four horsemen would “guarrantee localism, diversity, competition and fairness.”(?) To allow one media giant to own up to 45 percent of a market, owing newspapers, television stations , cable and radio stations, not to mention their clout on the Internet, is going to dispense diversity? Create competition? Economics 101 dispels these myths too easily.
What we are already seeing is the media caving in to syndication programming; drive 100 miles in any direction, listen to ten different radio stations and you hear Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage until the hair on the nap of your neck gives warning that there are predators afoot. Should you stumble upon one of the local non-syndicated, or barely syndicated hosts in a market, they are discussing the importance of using caution at the tanning salon, whether biscuits and gravy cause arterial discomfort, and little Penny Pennpacker’s pet poodle was pounced upon by a panther prowling the park. That is to say, the local hosts are quietly quite systematically being forced into doing only local programming in any market, leaving the “important” issues of the day, like the warmongering of the Washington Cabal, to the likes of Sean Hannity! Hannity, who asks the question on what “authority” does Susan Sarandon speak out against the President, by what “expertise” does this rich actress have an opinion at all. Nobody thinks to ask by what “authority and expertise” does Hannity endorse the President’s every word and deed? Indeed? This very rich entertainer, and that is all Hannity, O’Reilly, Limbaugh and Savage are, “entertainers” just like Susan, the four ponies of perdition. They have little expertise in any area of importance with the obvious exception of self-aggrandizement, self-proclaimed self-importance and their own hifalutin air of superiority as corporate whores.
I could even do that if Susan couldn’t do it well enough. But some of us choose to actually be expert at some one thing or another. How does one gain the reputation as expert in some area? By being consistently correct, predictably proficient, by sticking one’s neck out and making statements that seem an awful lot like warnings. That is to say, by issuing a caveat consistently correct before the event runs its course, making the case before-hand, not commenting by rote what’s reported in the news. That is what, and this is all the four ponies do every day, rubber-stamping the White House press releases and shouting done anyone that disagrees.
But the four ponies are much needed to protect the Four Horsemen which every couch tater knows all-too-well. The four ponies will not interview any expert that disagrees with them, let alone disagrees with the corporate policies of empire. Indeed, the Four Horsemen are the sturdy limbs of empire as this has always been throughout the ages. The four ponies are the sorry steeds which carry the malignant message. The local ponies are put to pasture, or turned into groveling dogs, they too do not interview the nationally known expert who lives locally in the same state, or even town as his issues are now of little importance to “local programming.” the local dogs in other towns must do the same with the added ingredient that “he” isn’t a local expert, so he cannot be interviewed because, as the redneck Hannitys and the Hatfields would say “he ain’t from around here”! Diversity has already gone out the window with this trend. Should the FCC ruling stand, and Mr. Bush veto the bill from the House and Senate noted below, this trend will become irreversible.
Here is what the Senate Commerce Committee has done: reflecting the widespread worry, that the Four Horsemen will gobble-up everything in sight, Safire reported:
...the Senate Commerce Committee voted last month to send to the floor Ted Stevens’s bill rolling back the F.C.C.‘s anything-goes ruling. It would reinstate current limits and also deny newspaper chains the domination of local TV and radio.... The Four Horsemen were confident they could get Bush to suppress a similar revolt in the House, where G.O.P. discipline is stricter. When liberals and conservatives of both parties in the House surprised them by passing a rollback amendment to an Appropriations Committee bill, the Bush administration issued what bureaucrats call a SAP - a written Statement of Administration Policy. It was the sappiest SAP of the Bush era. “If this amendment were contained in the final legislation presented to the President,” warned the administration letter, “his senior advisers would recommend that he veto the bill.”
The SAP was signed by the brand-new director of the Office of Management and Budget, Joshua Bolten, but the hand was the hand of Stephen Friedman, the former investment banker now heading the president's National Economic Council. Reached late yesterday, Friedman forthrightly made his case that the F.C.C. was an independent agency that had followed the rules laid down by the courts. He told me that Bush's senior advisers had focused on the question "Can you eliminate excessive regulation and have diversity and competition?" and found the answer to be yes. He added with candor: "The politics I'm still getting an education on."
The Bush veto threat would deny funding to the Commerce, State and Justice Departments, not to mention the federal judiciary. It would discombobulate Congress and disserve the public for months. And to what end? To turn what we used to call “public airwaves” into private fiefs, to undermine diversity of opinion and - in its anti-federalist homogenization of our varied culture - to sweep aside local interests and community standards of taste.
This would be Bush's first veto. Is this the misbegotten principle on which he wants to take a stand? At one of the White House meetings that decided on the SAP approach, someone delicately suggested that such a veto of the giants' power grab might pose "a communications issue" for the president (no play on words intended). Friedman blew that objection away. The SAP threat was delivered.
In the House this week, allies of the Four Horsemen distributed a point sheet drawn from Viacom and Murdoch arguments and asked colleagues to sign a cover letter reading, "The undersigned members . . . will vote to sustain a Presidential veto of legislation overturning or delaying . . . the decision of the FCC . . . regarding media ownership."
But they couldn't obtain the signatures of anywhere near one-third of the House members - the portion needed to stop an override. Yesterday afternoon, the comprehensive bill - including an F.C.C. rollback - passed by a vote of 400 to 21.
If Bush wishes to carry out the veto threat, he'll pick up a bunch of diehards (now called "dead-enders"), but he will risk suffering an unnecessary humiliation. What next? Much depends on who is chosen to go into the Senate-House conference. If the White House can't stop the rollback there, will Bush carry out the ill-considered threat? Sometimes you put the veto gun back in the holster. The way out: a president can always decide to turn down the recommendation of his senior advisers.
(Source: Washington, Bush's Four Horsemen By William Safire 7/24/03)