Many of us have read about the reign of Senator McCarthy on the House Un-American Activitiies Committee (HUAC), and how they terrorized millions of people over the fear of communists hiding under their beds, and ruined thousands of careers in the process. 55 years ago, McCarthyism crashed and burned in the aftermath of the Army-McCarthy hearings.
The funny thing is that McCarthy and the HUAC were brought down by a combination of the military and that era's corporate media.
More after the jump...
When the McCarthy and his cronies started throwing unfounded accusations at the military, the military fought back, leading to the famous Army-McCarthy hearings. All four of the broadcast networks of the time stepped into the fray.
CBS's Edward R. Murrow devoted a couple prime time half hours of his news program "See It Now" to the controversy. An additional half hour was provided to Senator McCarthy to respond -- a half hour of rantings, accusations, and innuendo that possibly did as much harm to McCarthy's image as had the "See it Now" broadcasts.
ABC, in turn, offered gavel to gavel coverage of the Army-McCarthy hearings to its affiliates. While they didn't really expect it to get many viewers, it also wasn't much of a sacrifice, since ABC essentially had no daytime schedule that would be preempted by the coverage. But the hearings turned out to be better drama than the soaps on NBC and CBS, and many millions of viewers did tune in. McCarthy and his band of thugs got more bad publicity and ABC got enough attention that it was able to subsequently launch a daytime schedule with some success. Per Wikipedia, 80 million people saw at least some of the coverage of those hearings. (Note that Dumont also gave the hearings extensive airtime, but Dumont was too far gone to be saved by anything by 1954. NBC also reportedly covered part of the hearings.) Army-McCarthy Hearings
Forty years later, Court TV (now TruTV) used the O.J. Simpson trial in much the same manner as ABC as used Army-McCarthy forty years earlier. Somehow, nothing sums up the deterioration of the corporate media quite as effectively as that simple comparison -- the transition from a focus on serious issues to one on gossip, celebrity, and trivia.
And that, in turn, leads us to where we are today. Today, the news media:
-gives more coverage to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton than it does to breaking international news.
-covers the sound and fury of the teabaggers and the disruptive town hall meetings without giving its audience the information that they need to put those disruptions in context.
-treats "both sides" in public debates as being equal, even when one side's points are based on fiction and lies, then calls this coverage "fair and balanced".
-covers the horse race aspects of politics (including the current debate over health care reform) while ignoring the substance of the political battles.
assumes rightwing talking points as being the "centrist" default position for the purpose of debate and discussion.
So, how did we get from two networks (out of only four) devoting all their daytime hours to something like the Army-McCarthy hearings to having hundreds of channels of fluff, talking heads, and celebrity gossip?
There's not just one answer to that question, but a couple of key points follow:
The first point is that until the eighties, only one of the major TV networks was a publicly traded corporation. CBS and ABC were both privately held, and (especially in the case of CBS) were owned and managed by people who had a sense of the public obligation associated with their networks. Today, all the networks are part of large, publicly traded corporations who see their news departments as another profit center...and that's about it. For Time-Warner, CNN isn't about making a fair profit by serving it's audience...it's just about the profit, period. The same thing can be said at the other networks. Over on the newspaper side, it seems that the few newspapers that didn't become part of large publicly traded groups are the ones that seem to be weathering the current recession -- probably because they aren't having to cut staff just to meet debt service payments.
The evidence that we're seeing in recent years is that news media as publicly traded corporations doesn't seem to be a winning bet.
The second point, of course, is deregulation. In the sixties, an activist FCC actually refused to allow the sale of the ABC network to a multinational conglomerate (ITT) on the basis that such an ownership change would not serve the public interest. Note that the argument that ABC was unprofitable and needed the infusion of cash from the conglomerate did not sway the FCC. The FCC also imposed limits on the amount of advertising that stations could run (that's why infomercials didn't appear on TV until the eighties), requirements for some "public service" programming, ownership restrictions, and much, much more. Note that the broadcasting business was extremely profitable (especially for major and medium market television stations) during this era of heavy regulation.
Starting in the eighties, the era of deregulation began. Throughout the eighties and nineties, rules were eliminated and ownership limits were relaxed. We're all familiar with the results -- the almost total demise of actual news reporting by any radio stations (even so-called "news" stations are really mostly opinion and talk anymore), and the steady concentration of ownership. The latter means that while we have the illusion of more choice, the reality is that we have less choice because all those different channels are controlled by the same companies.
Strangely enough, all that deregulation has resulted in a less profitable broadcasting business. Once again, the conservative mantra of deregulation seems to be wrong...
One reason why that deregulation has been such a disaster for the broadcast industry is the rise of cable and satellite TV. Back in the seventies, much of the left saw the then new cable TV industry as being the salvation of television. No more would the "lowest common denominator" rule the dial. Unfortunately, those folks never saw the rise of E!, VH1, Bravo, A&E, and the multitude of other channels that are essentially devoted to mind-numbing trash. How did they end up being so wrong about cable?
Unfortunately, the rise of cable coincided with the era of deregulation. The result is that the cable industry was never adequately regulated, and the result was a level of ownership concentration that makes the broadcast business look diffused by comparison. Big companies bulked up by buying a whole bunch of cable networks and forcing cable systems (and, later, satellite services) to carry all of them on the lowest tier. Viewers were forced to buy on an "all or nothing" basis, which prevents those viewers from being able to easily vote against channels that they see as worthless by cancelling their payments for those particular channels. It's all structured to maximize corporate profits, of course -- and it does so very effectively. Public service of any sort is not even a consideration.
Hopefully, a debate for the coming years will be over where we go from here. Corporate apologists are already arguing that the current financial woes of the media are justification for even more deregulation. We need to be prepared to respond -- not just to keep them from winning, but also to eventually reverse some of the deregulation of the eighties and nineties -- and to force real cable ownership regulation for the first time.