Newspapers are bad for your health

Nick Fillmore

By Nick Fillmore, www.rabble.ca

Traditional for-profit media, including our daily newspapers, radio and TV news, filter out all kinds of information they don’t want us to get our hands on. This filtering process includes many kinds of stories, including reports that would offend advertisers but, if carried, would alert the public to things such as improper corporate behaviour.

Corporate-owned media also slant the content of stories so that, for instance, some stories paint a negative picture of organized labour, protest groups or some environmental organizations.

On the other hand, what corporate media does allow to pass freely through the filter are all kinds of stories that tout capitalism as being good for everyone. They endorse free-market economic practices, even though such policies tend to make the poor even poorer and the rich richer.

For instance, between 1980 and 2005, a period when unrestricted capitalism dominated life in the country, median earnings among Canada’s top income earners rose more than 16 per cent while those in the bottom fifth saw their wages dip by 20 per cent.

News editors know which topics can’t be covered

Traditional news departments follow unwritten but well-understood guidelines concerning what they should not cover. Most people in the newsrooms have been so thoroughly indoctrinated in corporate ideology that they seldom suggest a story that falls outside of the guidelines.

When a contentious story comes along, its fate is determined away from the newsroom, behind closed doors. And management sees to it that only the editors they approve of make key decisions about what stories are covered in the news.

In response to a survey conducted in 2007, some 60 per cent of a cross-section of more than 600 journalists from for-profit newspapers, TV and radio said that the values and politics of their corporate owners had an effect on the editorial agenda of their news organization.

“The people that get promoted to positions of responsibility in a newsroom,” says author and columnist Linda McQuaig, “tend to be people who share the views of those who ultimately own the paper, or are willing to go along with those points of view.”

She has first-hand knowledge of how the newspaper power structure works from her years as a business reporter for The Globe and Mail. “If you don’t [share such views], you don’t tend to get promoted into those positions.”

Serious news censorship to protect profits began more than 100 years ago, when newspaper owners found that they could get rich from selling advertising. They quickly stopped publishing stories that would in any way offend their advertisers.

While this practice still helps the media companies’ bottom line, it prevents the public from having access to all kinds of information, including reports that might alert someone to problems at a company they’re doing business with, or to a company using bad business practices.

Nowadays, traditional media companies occasionally carry individual stories about the transgressions of corporations. When there are such stories, they are usually buried in a paper’s business section.

When a corporation is convicted of a crime, most traditional media editors would say that it involved “just one bad apple in the barrel.” But, in truth, there are countless bad apples in the barrel — corporations charged and convicted of price fixing, bribery, industrial espionage and tax fraud, among other wrongs.

Media covers street crime, but not corporate crime

But Canadian media companies do not cover the world of corporate crime in a way that would alert the public to the extent of the problem or that would act as a deterrent to corporations.

The media companies apparently prefer to have lots of reporters covering criminal courts or following the police as they catch petty criminals, but not reporting on corporate criminals who cost the North American economy billions of dollars each year.

Meanwhile, a small but long-established U.S. magazine, Multinational Monitor, does report on the activities of big corporations. Each year it publishes a list of “The 10 Worst Corporations.” Six of the ten companies on its most recent U.S. list also do business in Canada.

The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008

AIG
Cargill
Chevron
CNPC
Constellation Energy
Dole
General Electric
Imperial Sugar
Philip Morris Int’l.
Roche Multinational Monitor

An Internet search of several Canadian newspapers turned up no coverage of the cases cited by the magazine.

In the same way that the traditional news media show little interest in reporting on corporate crime, they make little effort to investigate and alert the public to situations concerning faulty goods and products.

If newspapers wanted to attract readers and show they care about consumers, they could take their journalists who write “puff pieces” for the Cars or Homes promotion sections and have them investigate possible consumer fraud situations.

Obviously, media that are primarily driven by advertising revenue are not going to take on this kind of journalism. This is simply another conflict area in which for-profit media cannot — or will not — provide the kind of service that the public needs.

Tomorrow – Reporting on the rich and powerful

Mr. Fillmore, a past-president of the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) and former Executive Director of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE), is a freelance journalist and media fundraiser based in Toronto. He can be contacted at: fillmore0274@rogers.com