MEDIA WATCH

It takes a Village (Voice) to raze the media

By Mark Pickens

When do jaundiced business ethics tarnish a newspaper’s hard-won reputation for feisty, progressive reporting?

Between Sept. 27 and Oct. 2, Village Voice Media (VVM) snuffed out a Cleveland newspaper on 24- hours notice, slit the throat of a union drive at the chain’s second-largest paper, and sealed a deal with its biggest rival to divide up markets in two cities. The actions have attracted the attention of the Justice Department’s anti-trust division, according to sources close to the deals.

The events have left staffers at the six VVM-owned papers wondering what’s happened to America’s alternative press.

“It just shows that alternative media is now a part of big media business,” said David Eden, former editor-in-chief of the now-defunct Cleveland Free Times.

VVM head David Schneiderman pulls the levers for a consortium of Wall Street investment bankers and venture capitalists that bought the Voice papers for a reported $150 million in January 2001. This was a step up for Schneiderman, who was previously the publisher of the Village Voice.

“We definitely think of David Schneiderman as the Wicked Witch of the West,” says Erin Aubrey, staff writer and union president at VVM’s LA Weekly.

The 2001 deal brought the 57-year-old Voice under the combined ownership of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, a group of Dutch investors, and Goldman Sachs, America’s third largest brokerage house.

The new management now owns some of the most respected alternative newspapers in America, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Village Voice, the LA Weekly, the City Pages in Minneapolis, the Seattle Weekly, the OC Register in California’s Orange County, and the Nashville Scene. With a combined circulation of 900,000 copies and annual revenue of $90 million, VVM is the largest alternative chain in the country.

It took just months for VVM to institute its new bare-knuckles management style. In May, a dispute over unionizing the LA Weekly’s advertising department began to divide journalists and managers at the paper. Pressed by escalating sales quotas, post-Sept. 11 layoffs and other job security issues, the paper’s ad staff petitioned to join the already unionized writers.

Given the Weekly’s unwavering editorial stance as an ally of labor unions, employees were stunned when the new Schneiderman-appointed publisher, Beth Sestanovich, deployed every means at her disposal to defeat the organizing campaign.

“It was like Union Busting 101,” says Aubrey.

After questionable tactics, including intimidation, withholding of raises, and hiring a well-known “labor relations” law firm to help squash the union drive, pro-union staff were defeated by just two votes in an election held on Sept. 27.

“We’re regarded as the gold standard of labor reporting in LA,” says Aubrey. “Suddenly [management is] at war with their own paper. It struck us as extremely hypocritical.”

Sestanovich’s union busting echoes events this past summer at the Village Voice itself. Staff in New York came within 24 hours of a strike after Schneiderman’s management moved to slash health and retirement benefits, as reported in the July Indypendent.

Just five days after the coup de grace for the Weekly union, though, another VVM-devised hammer fell on the alternative news world, this time hitting both LA and Cleveland.

Schneiderman and VVM colluded with ostensible arch-rival, Phoenix-based New Times, a chain of 12 alternative papers, in announcing a surprise deal on Oct. 2. VVM closed its Cleveland Free Times and paid $8 million to New Times for it to shutter the LA New Times. As the only two cities where the chains had competing weeklies, the swap effectively ended competition between the two publishing giants.

Nationally, some 250 alternative weeklies generate $500 million in annual revenue, according to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. VVM and New Times together rake in nearly one-third of the revenue.

The LA-Cleveland deal raised immediate cries of foul play from many corners of the alternative newsweekly world.

“We give the finger to all those who think this is a good deal for LA,” said Alex Ben Block of the LA Press Club, alluding to the popular column, The Finger, which ran in the now-defunct LA New Times.

The move also came as a total surprise to David Eden, then-Cleveland Free Times editor in chief.

“I heard about it the same day it happened,” said Eden. “They had a few people come in from New York and give out final paychecks.”

The controversies spanning from LA to Cleveland and New York point to a widening gap between VVM’s business behavior and the editorial support its newspapers often give to progressive issues.

The Village Voice, for example, was going to print with a hard-hitting story on the woes of a construction workers’ union (Local 32 B-J) in New York just at the same time its parent company was squashing its own employees’ union drive in LA.

Howard Blume, staffwriter and vice president of the writers’ union at the LA Weekly, thinks these changes bode ill not just for the employees, but the public at large.

“There’s both a consolidation of media ownership and a shrinking of media jobs and that’s bad in every way possible,” says Blume. “There seems to be more news and more media than ever, but it’s a mile wide and only an inch deep.”

Source: NYC Indypendent: <http://nyc.indymedia.org>

Indonesia’s broadcasting
act: a ‘return to repression’

By Kafil Yamin

Jakarta, Indonesia, Nov. 28 (IPS)— It took Indonesia’s House of Representatives more than two years of often-heated debate to pass a controversial broadcasting bill on Thursday, but critics here say the law is a return to the repressive measures of the Suharto regime.

“Media businessmen in Indonesia should get ready to go to jail,” said Karni Ilyas, chairman of the Association of Indonesian Television Broadcasting (ATVSI), referring to criminal offences that a breach of the act could entail.

At least a third of the bill’s 63 articles carry the threat of fines or imprisonment, says the Indonesian Society of Press and Broadcasting.

Particularly offensive, say free speech advocates, are articles that restrict domestic programming, with the official intent to control news, editorial, and entertainment deemed to promote violence, pornography, gambling, and unethical behavior.

Also tightly controlled will be any material that has the potential to aggravate tribal, racial, and religious relations in this country of 220 million people.

Another controversial aspect of the law is the authority of the industry regulatory body, the Indonesian Broadcasting Committee (KPI).

Critics are concerned about the KPI’s powers to control broadcasting content, set the limits to media ownership, decide the licensing process for frequencies and broadcasting, limit advertisements, and decide the punishment for breaches of these regulations.

The passage of the law represents the single biggest shake-up of the Indonesian broadcasting landscape since the 1998 fall of the Suharto regime, which controlled the media for 30 years with an iron fist.

But critics here say the broadcasting bill drafted by the government of President Megawati Sukarnoputri bears too many similarities to Suharto’s notorious Information Ministry, which exercised almost absolute control over the publishing and broadcast media.

Throughout the Suharto years, the Information Ministry closed down 237 press publications and obliged privately operated television and radio stations to relay news from the state-run Televisi Republik Indonesia (TVRI) and the state-run Radio Republik Indonesia (RRI).

President Abdurrahman Wahid -- Megawati’s predecessor, who stepped down in October 1998 -- dissolved the Information Ministry but later established the State Information Dissemination Bureau, which was filled by the Information Ministry’s employees but did not have the power to control the press.

The post-1998 years have seen new media outlets mushroom across the country. Since Suharto’s fall, Indonesia has seen the number of radio stations increase by 50 percent to 1,100, and that of commercial television stations double to 10. The country also now has 15 regional television stations.

But the bill undercuts the gains of Indonesia’s young democracy, experts say.

“The KPI is nothing but the rebirth of the defunct Information Ministry,” Yanto added.

The broadcast act also restricts cross ownership of the media, forcing media-ownership firms to decide whether to concentrate their media holdings in print, television or radio. The bill stipulates fines of up to 20 billion rupiah (US $2.2 million) and a two-year jail term for breach of the cross-ownership laws.

The law envisages a two-year adjustment period before the cross-ownership laws come into effect, but most big media companies here have diverse cross-ownership arrangements and complain that two years is too short a transition period.

Djafar Assegaff, a senior journalist, said the emergence of multimedia technology has made cross ownership unavoidable. “The media is becoming more and more integrated. It’s getting difficult to separate them,” he said.

But Dedy Mulyana, a media expert from the Bandung-based Padjadjaran University, said the cross-ownership restrictions are justified in Indonesia to prevent oligopolies gaining control of a media industry adjusting from a controlled to a democratic environment.

“I think the regulation is aimed at preventing monopoly in this business. If a number of media control big capital and this capital builds alliances with certain political organizations, this will greatly harm the people’s interest,” Dedy said.

Without adequate regulation, the situation “would turn into a monopoly in information. This would then be against freedom of the press itself,” he added.

‘Old boys network’: women confined to pink media ghetto

By Jennifer L. Pozner

Ask a feminist to identify the most important issue facing women today, and chances are she wouldn’t immediately point to the media. But she should.

Corporate media is key to why our fast-moving culture is so slow to change, stereotypes are so stubborn, and the power structure so entrenched. By determining who can and cannot speak, which issues are discussed and how they are framed, media have the power to maintain the status quo or challenge the dominant order. Without accurate, non-biased news coverage and challenging, creative cultural expression it is virtually impossible to significantly move public opinion of social justice issues and create lasting change.

And how have media used this power where women’s rights are concerned? With a vengeance.

From the earliest days of the women’s movement media have branded feminism “a hair-raising emotional orgy of hatred” led by “freaks… incapable of coming to terms with their own natures as females” (Esquire, 1971), a “passing fad” (New York Times, 1972), and a “lost cause” (Vogue, 1983), a “failure” (Newsweek, 1990) and a “dead” movement overrun by “a whole lot of stylish fluff ” (Time, 1998).

By the late 1990s news outlets from NBC to PBS portrayed feminists as waging unjust “sex wars” and heralding a “gender Armageddon.” And by the turn of the millennium Men’s Health magazine reported that “militant,” “hostile” young feminists are oppressing men on college campuses by insisting on strong sexual assault policies and women’s studies programs.

Today, similar sentiments span outlets from the liberal Atlantic Monthly to the conservative Fox News Network. This antifeminist hostility can be felt in coverage of topics editors narrowly define as “women’s issues” (e.g., rape, abortion, child care), where stereotypes are invoked and perpetuated.

Take the ways in which sexual violence is sensationalized and used to scare women into sexual and social conformity. Victim-blaming is still prevalent: “What responsibility, if any, did the women have for what happened…?” asked Dateline NBC after dozens of women were sexually assaulted in Central Park in June 2000.

Then there are the endless, frightening headlines about attempted rapists on the loose. Since sexual predators don’t just get bored mid-attack, behind every story about an attempted rape is the reality that some woman did something to get away. So, why no triumphant headlines about women fighting back, fending off their assailants?

A similar framing problem persists in coverage of abortion, media’s favorite hot-button “women’s issue.” Consider how loath media have been to label shootings, fire bombings, death threats and other politically-motivated violence against abortion providers as “terrorism.”

Only after Sept. 11, when newscasters received letters claiming to be laced with anthrax, did mainstream media finally “discover” the story — reported over the past decade in the women’s and alternative press — that anti-abortion terrorists have subjected women’s health advocates and clinics to a regular campaign of anthrax threats and violent — even fatal — crime for many frightening years (with more than 500 such letters arriving pre-9/11).

When issues fall outside journalists’ pink ghetto yet implicitly affect women’s survival (e.g., global trade, affairs of state, war), gender is rarely used as a lens for analysis.

For example, poll data following Sept. 11 showed women to be more moderate than men in their views about war. Yet corporate media presented a misleading picture of a flag-waving populace united behind the Bush push for military retaliation. Because women were nearly invisible as sources, experts and pundits in news debates, this notion went virtually unchallenged — helping the administration drum up support for an unending “war on terror.”

Similarly, though women and children are 90 percent of the world’s sweatshop workers, editors almost never frame international economics as a “women’s issue.” Instead, global trade stories are told from the perspective of transnational corporations, not the female workers who suffer labor and human rights abuses daily in overseas and domestic sweatshops. This pro-business bias protects the financial interests of media advertisers, investors and parent companies, while denying the public information that might make us question our personal consumer decisions or collectively challenge corporate exploitation.

If it is clear that women have a serious stake in media coverage, it is equally important to recognize that biased content is the end result of a much larger institutional problem — a media system structured in favor of advertisers and owners rather than citizens seeking information and entertainment; a system motivated by profit, not the public interest.

We are at a crucial moment for the media industry. The deregulatory structure favored by big media and its favorite lap-dog, Federal Communications Commission Chair Michael Powell, would pave the way for the tightest convergence of media power we have ever seen in this country, threatening to subvert women’s and public interest voices more thoroughly than ever.

We have two choices: we can sit back and wait until all our news is filtered through the lens of MSNBC-NNBCBSABCFOXAOLWB, Inc. — or we can work for progressive feminist media reform.

Jennifer L. Pozner is founder of Women In Media & News (WIMN), a women’s media monitoring, training and outreach organization. This piece is adapted from “The ‘Big Lie’: False Feminist Death Syndrome, Profit, and the Media,” in the forthcoming “Catching A Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century.”

Source: NYC Indypendent: <http://nyc.indymedia.org>

The Office of Strategic
Influence is gone, but
are its programs in place?

Nov. 27— The Federation of American Scientists has pointed to a startling revelation by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that mainstream media have missed: In remarks during a recent press briefing, Rumsfeld suggested that though the controversial Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) no longer exists in name, its programs are still being carried out.

The OSI came under scrutiny last February, when the New York Times reported (2/19/02) that the new Pentagon group was “developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations.” The news was met with outrage, and within a week the Pentagon had closed down the OSI, saying that negative attention had damaged the office’s reputation so much “that it could not operate effectively” (AP, 2/26/02).

The plan was troubling for many reasons: It was profoundly undemocratic; it would have put journalists’ lives at risk by involving them in Pentagon disinformation; and it’s almost certain that any large-scale disinformation campaign directed at the foreign press would have led, sooner or later, to a falsified story being picked up by US media.

At the time, Rumsfeld claimed that he had “never even seen the charter for the office,” but Thomas Timmes, the OSI’s assistant for operations, said that Rumsfeld had been briefed on its goals “at least twice” and had “given his general support” (New York Times, 2/25/02).

Now, in remarks made at a Nov. 18 media briefing, Rumsfeld has suggested that though the exposure of OSI’s plans forced the Pentagon to close the office, they certainly haven’t given up on its work. According to a transcript on the Department of Defense website, Rumsfeld told reporters:

“And then there was the Office of Strategic Influence. You may recall that. And ‘oh my goodness gracious isn’t that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall.’ I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing, fine, I’ll give you the corpse. There’s the name. You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done, and I have.”

A search of the Nexis database indicates that no major US media outlets — no national broadcast television news shows, no major US newspapers, no wire services or major magazines — have reported Rumsfeld’s remarks.

Rumsfeld’s comments seem all the more alarming in light of analysis presented by William Arkin in a recent Los Angeles Times opinion column (11/24/02), in which he argues that Rumsfeld is redesigning the US military to make “information warfare” central to its functions.

This new policy, says Arkin, increasingly “blurs or even erases the boundaries between factual information and news, on the one hand, and public relations, propaganda and psychological warfare, on the other.” Arkin adds that “while the policy ostensibly targets foreign enemies, its most likely victim will be the American electorate.”

Source: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR): <www.fair.org>

Media Briefs

Journalists in Belarus win press freedom award

The Belarusian Association of Journalists has been awarded the 2003 Golden Pen of Freedom, the annual press freedom prize of the World Association of Newspapers, for its courageous resistance to the repression of the media by President Aleksandr Lukashenko.

In a statement, the WAN Board said: “The Belarusian Association of Journalists is fighting bravely against what is probably the most repressive regime in Europe. Many of the 900 members of the association have been jailed, beaten and repeatedly prosecuted. If it were not for the extraordinary resistance of this organization, freedom of information and expression would most likely have been entirely eliminated in this country. ...This is only the second time in the forty-year history of the Golden Pen that it has been awarded to a group, rather than an individual.” (WAN/IFEX)

Ad banned for
poking fun at
President Bush

A British advertising watchdog said Wed., Nov. 27 that it was banning a commercial for an animated comedy series because it pokes fun at President Bush. The Broadcast Advertising Clearance Center said the ad could only be shown if the makers sought the president’s permission first. The commercial promotes a video and DVD of highlights from “2DTV,” an animated series that mocks celebrities and politicians.

The BACC monitors compliance with rules governing advertising on British television. One of the guidelines says living people should not be caricatured or referred to in advertisements without their permission.

The producer of “2DTV,” Giles Pilbrow, said requiring satirists to seek permission from their targets was “an idiotic request” that would mean asking Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein if it was all right to caricature them.

“I doubt we could get Bin Laden’s permission — he’s a bit tricky to track down at the moment,” he said.

The offending ad shows Bush opening a copy of the video and saying, “My favorite — just pop it in the video player.” He then sticks it into a toaster and burns it. (AP)

‘Smart signs’
will tailor ads
to radio listeners’ preferences

Starting next month, two freeway billboards in the Sacramento area will be able to tell which radio stations passing cars are tuned to and then change the image on the sign to fit listeners’ profiles.

Both billboards are run by Alaris Media Network Inc. of Sacramento, which operates 10 such billboards in California. Unlike their more traditional counterparts, the electronic billboards can change advertising displays every few seconds, running through a set series of video messages. They will be equipped with sensors that pick up radio frequencies from passing cars and trucks.

The billboards will be programmed to change based on the listening habits of the majority of people driving by at a given time, rather than tailoring their messages to individual passers-by.

“Once we know what radio station you’re listening to, then we know a lot about you,” said Alaris President Tom Langeland. “We know how old you are, where you like to shop, your household income, whether you’re married or single.” (Sacramento Bee)