WBAI Radio- An Important Voice- Keeping It Meaningful & Alternative (Library Defenders Running For Its Local Station Board)

With the consolidation of most media into just six conglomerates and the pervasive influence of monied interests, it is increasing important that alternatives to the dominant corporate narratives be preserved and remain strong and grow more robust.  WBAI Radio is a rare asset to which we still have recourse as an alternative, and it is particularly important as a terrestrial broadcasting signal, which, when it broadcasts the kind of subversive, transgressive content capable of changing things, can remain off the grid and avoid manipulation (unlike the digital conduits for communication that we are increasingly shunted towards).

WBAI was one of the few media outlets that has been giving Citizens Defending Libraries, and the news about the selling off libraries substantial and somewhat regular coverage, particularly, for example on WBAI’s Morning Show.

WBAI needs to be strong, strongly supported and there is critical value in its growing stronger still.

There are things everyone can do to support and strengthen the station:

    •    Listen to the station.  Familiarize yourself with what you can find there and let others know about shows broadcast on it such as FAIR’s Counterspin, The Project Censored Show, national news throughout the week on Democracy Now, local news coverage via the Morning Show, media critiques with satirically informed asides via the Jimmy Dore Show, Law and Disorder.  Increased listenership ripples outward in its effect bringing more awareness, resources and contributors.  It also qualifies the station for more public broadcasting funds.

    •    Provide the station with feedback about the content broadcast on WBAI that you like or that you don’t enjoy (that much) so that programming can continually improve.  We know that some people don’t always appreciate all of what they hear on WBAI, but listener feedback and participation can help steer where the station goes, keeping it on track and on mission, plus making changes when changes make sense.  It is also important to know that the station has long been suffering through, and is only now just catching up from, a period where it was drastically under-resourced in its efforts to generate quality broadcasts.  That was a result of 9/11 and the ensuing drain of exorbitantly expensive antenna charges that have finally been eliminated (plus the effects of Superstorm Sandy).

    •    Contribute to WBAI.  WBIA is truly a listener supported station.  That’s unlike the WNYC stations where, when we checked recently, WNYC was getting only about 30% of its support from listener membership dollars.  Those WNYC listener support dollars have to compete with the rest of the funding from corporate sponsorships and from the sort of very wealthy individuals typically associated with those kinds of corporations and interests.  That’s almost certainly why, if you listen attentively to WNYC programming, you will find that much of it more and more often reflects a corporatist bent. . . . WBAI produces what it airs with a much smaller budget than WNYC, so each dollar listeners give to WBAI supports a much greater proportion of the station’s overall programming.   Having done some rough calculations, we work it that each listener dollar currently given to WBAI supports, on a proportional basis, 62 times as much of the station’s overall content production: Each listener dollar released into WBAI’s shoestring budget pond swims there as a much bigger fish.* You should also know that there is crossover point where additional dollars going to WBAI, transition from being survival dollars to being dollars that can go straight into significant upgrades of the content it delivers.

            (* Of course only “rough” comparisons are possible.  If you think of WNYC listener dollars as being `leveraged’ by the corporate dollars, you might think of them as supporting more of the overall programming, but if you think of those listener dollars as first having to wrestle with and neutralize the effect of the much greater corporate funding then you will think of those dollars as ultimately funding even less programming.  There are also webcasting streams, web accessible archives and podcasts associated with both WBAI and WNYC.  Further, WNYC, with its FM, and AM station and its also running the WQXR Classical stations, two of them taking into account the HD, High Definition broadcasting, that WNYC does, means that WNYC could be thought of as three or four stations thus allowing one to do the calculations that assume WNYC listener dollars go slightly further in catching up.  In the future though, WBAI’s new, much less expensive, antenna is also capable of HD broadcasting which means that WBAI can itself start broadcasting three terrestrial HD broadcasts simultaneously on its 99.5 signal.)

   •    Volunteer at WBAI.

   •    Vote in the WBAI elections to elect members to the Local Station Board.  If you have been contributing to WBAI (that can include volunteer work contributions) in the prior year you should be on the look out for your ballot for the local station board elections.  If you haven’t been contributing during the past year, it is a reason to start contributing now so you will be eligible to vote next election.  (If you contribute signing up as as a WBAI Buddy you won't have to remember to renew.)  This year there are names of people running that library defenders will recognize as other library defenders in the fight t save NYC libraries: Citizen Defending Libraries co-founders Carolyn McIntyre and Michael D. D. White, Katherine O’Sullivan from the fight to save the Inwood Library and Michael Jankowitz.  Those familiar with defnding libraries will also recognize some other additional names of people who have been very helpfully involved.  Considerations about who to vote for follow below.     The fight to protect WBAI as an information commons obviously involves a significant overlap with the fight to defend the libraries.  (The deadline for voting in the election is March 5th.  Last minute votes can be cast electronically.  There have been problems with listener contributors not getting their ballots.  To request a ballot to vote CLICK HERE FOR THE BALLOT REQUEST FORM https://goo.gl/forms/BvfLLCrl4DnnB0pD3.  Also, if you have problems alert the National Election Supervisor with an email to nes@pacifica.org   Lastly, please search you emails for for vote@simplyvoting.com. Email reminders are sent with the ballot weekly on Wednesdays. Subject will start with "2018 Pacifica Station Elections")

The governance structure of WBAI is a trifle intricate.  The power of WBAI’s Local Station board is somewhat limited in that much of the decision-making with respect to programming is handled by the national Pacifica Foundation board of which WBAI has been an affiliate since the beginning of the 1960s.  But the WBAI board appoints some of the members of the Pacifica board, and, after serving on the Local Station Board for a qualifying period, members become eligible to be appointed to the national board.  There is also a third board, the Community Advisory Board, which is one mechanism through which the public can give feedback to the station about content and shows WBAI broadcasts.

The key issue of this local station board election involves whether WBAI might be sold and lost to the public: This means lost in terms of what has historically made the station great; in terms of what its mission statement dictates WBAI should to aspire; and what WBAI can be in the future.  The station could also be lost in other ways than through an outright sale: It might be lost through a lease or through other more subtle legal mechanisms that would surrender programming decisions and control so that the station would no longer be nimble and able to accountably respond to listeners and supporters with the programming they want.  (A very good, very clear, succinct description of the issues surrounding the election is available here:  Don’t Let Listener Supported WBAI Radio Succumb To a Privatizing “Partnership”.)

Recently a great deal of effort has been put into eliminating financial handicaps faced by the station by transitioning the station to a new, better, far less expensive antenna arrangement and improving WBAI’s accounting to ensure it qualifies for public broadcasting funds and keeps its tax exempt status secure.  The same people who worked to do that are also working hard to ensure that the station and its programing independence and accountability to listeners are not lost through sale or lease of the station or by any other more complex, harder-to-understand legal arrangements.   

In this age of rampant privatization we cannot afford to lose such an important public asset, another public commons essential for free voices to be heard.  And, as noted above, protecting WBAI as a free and open channel for information distinct from what gets filtered through mainstream corporate sources has much in common with the fight to save libraries and ensure that those libraries remain robustly stocked with a full range of books. 

Flyer about election- Click to enlarge, download or print

A mailing went around to WBAI listeners (see above) endorsing a slate of candidates for the local station board, including the candidates known from the library fight mentioned above, who are opposing the sale or lease of the station (or surrender of program decision making).  Those candidates are known as the “Indy” or “Independent” slate.  (There is a website- with pics- furnishing information about the Indy candidates). . .

. . .  Local Station Board elections are run according to a form of instant run-off voting, something we approve of.  Not all forms of instant run-off voting are the same and the devil is in the details.  Voters can vote for whomever they want, but it has been explained to us that the way that the system works in this instance is that votes will go the furthest in electing the greatest number of candidates from this slate if voters rank their candidates from the slate in the same order. .  At least to a reasonably close degree.  (Votes for other candidates than these would work against the election of candidates from this slate.)

Back of flyer about election- Click to enlarge, download or print

This suggested ranking is not a reflection of particular candidates, but it does mean that to elect the most candidates firmly opposing the sale or lease of the station in any way shape of form, it is probably best to follow the suggested ranking of the widely circulated flyer, which flyer also took in some guess-spectations about which candidates will top the list as vote recipients.

Let’s save and protect the libraries. . . And let’s also work to make sure that WBAI is the best most robust station serving the public interest that it can be.

* * * *

The ranking of Indy candidates in the flyer is:

    1.    Randy Credico
    2.    Alex Steinberg
    3.    Mitchel Cohen
    4.    Carolyn McIntyre
    5.    Michael D. D. White
    6.    Marilyn Vogt-Downey
    7.    Carolyn Birden
    8.    Jim Dingeman
    9.    Linda Zises
    10.    Katherine O’Sullivan
    11.    Shatia Strother
    12.    Jack De Palma
    13.    Michael Jankowitz
    14.    Michael Lardner
    15.    Neale Vos
    16.    Maxine Harrison-Gallmon

For WBAI staff members (who vote separately) the flyer ranks:

    1.    Max Schmid
    2.    Shawn Rhodes
    3.    R. Paul Martin
    4.    Paul DeRienzo

For more information about the candidates and to read their full statements and their answers to the Pacifica’s questions for LSB candidates go to the Pacifica Foundation site: Pacifica Election Candidate List (or click on the links above for particular candidates).

(DISCLAIMER: As should probably be obvious, this post is a Citizens Defending Libraries product, and is not the result of or through any affiliation with WBAI or Pacifica.)

The statements of Citizens Defending Libraries co-founders Carolyn McIntyre and Michael D. D. White are below (+ click on link for Q&As):

Statement of Carolyn E. McIntyre

As a social worker, therapist, and Co-Founder of Citizens Defending Libraries, I am actively dealing with social and environmental justice issues in the face of growing inequality and the disempowerment of diverse community voices.  I see WBAI as having an increasingly important role in providing a forum for underrepresented voices.  The WBAI market is the largest market and with listenership much lower than what it used to be; there is much that can be done to change that.  My husband, Michael White, and I have hosted forums on Where Do You Get Your News, Voter Disenfranchisement, and the Sell-Off of Public Assets including public libraries, NYCHA housing, public parks and public schools.  We have been a supporter and contributor of WBAI and have been guests on the WBAI Morning Show.  It is an integral part of my social work values and personal ethics to value the worth of all as well as the environment and foster compassion, the felt sense that we are all connected.  I seek to keep WBAI on the air and listener supported, protecting it from exploitative real estate contracts, protect the signal from being sold off, providing outlets for whistle blowers and under-represented democracy protectors.  I would like to greatly expand the WBAI memberships and listenership, grow the volunteer culture with live events and events live streamed from places like The Commons and regain grant money from Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Statement of Michael D. D. White

I want to be on the board of WBAI because I think it is essential that WBAI grow, strengthen and thrive to perform the role that only a truly listener supported public radio station like WBAI (eschewing corporate-mindset sponsors) can: Offering a variety of rich and wide-ranging counter narratives to the constrained and in many ways often destructive memes of that pass for “public discourse” in the mainstream corporate media.  On an X Y axis, the content of WBAI should, on the one hand, be about what is most critical to the public interest, and, on the other hand, it should provide the information and insight that tend to be most buried and censored today by the monied interests controlling most media access.  I envision WBAI as a discovery porthole through which any listener tuning in can discover what they are unlikely to discover elsewhere that is important to their understanding of the world, its past, and our possible futures.  That includes regularly providing pointers toward sources for further information and exploration (including other WBAI and Pacifica programming).

WBAI programing should be alert for the fresh, new and surprising that will enthrall listeners and keep them curious, turned in and coming back for more.  At the same time history lets us connect the dots to hold power accountable and put the present in context.  We need to be able to depend on WBAI to transgress conventional media boundaries, escaping the usual ruts other media falls into (while not falling into ruts of our own).  The most effective guide star for escape?: integrity!

Let’s recognize how powerful it is that the New York metro broadcast area WBAI serves is the nation’s largest. Furthermore, New York is a hub of media production and WBAI needs to respond to the culture based here with a meta-awareness and media-literate criticality of how other New York-based media institutions don’t serve the public faithfully.  This could be great fun, liberating and involving for our audience.  It could also launch syndication of several nationally relevant programs.  Similarly, WBAI broadcasts should showcase the best nationally relevant Pacifica programs . .

But, WBAI also needs to take advantage of the rich local flavor of New York for programming that addresses local issues.  WBAI needs to distinguish itself by sinking its teeth into local news coverage, because local news coverage in NYC is embarrassingly poor, so much of it bowing to influence, ownership and control of the real estate industry, which is to local politics what oil money is to national politics.

Lastly, and quite important, there are many reasons why WBAI needs to continue broadcasting its signal terrestrially to the New York metropolis via its antenna.  Reasons that get discussed too little are that dissemination of thoughts and ideas and real time building community in such fashion is less subject to surveillance and cannot be throttled, censored or neutralized by internet algorithms, or if net neutrality is abolished.  

List of Journalists Fired or Self-exiled From Mainstream Media Outlets Because They Expressed or Wanted to Express Views (Like Being Critical of U.S. Wars) Unacceptable to the Outlets They Were Working For

We just updated [and updated here again on December 3, 2018] our list of journalists exiled or fired from mainstream media for expressing views that were unacceptable to their employers.  As you'll note, it was frequently because they expressed views that were critical of U.S. waged war.   We started this list in connection with our forums on where to get reliable news.  See our page here: Coming June 1st - Forum (The second) Where Do You Get Your News? What Are The Channels of Public Information Communication You Can Plug Into?

We are pretty sure we need to make additions to the this list and invite your suggestions. . . 


List of journalists fired or self-exiled from mainstream media outlets because they expressed or wanted to express views unacceptable to the outlets they were working for:

•        Phil Donahue- Legendary television host fired from his top-rated program by the “supposedly liberal” MSNC in 2003 during the run up to the Iraq War because he was expressing anti-war views.

    •    Bill Maher- Fired by ABC from his “Politically Incorrect” program for not saying exactly the right things about 9/11 in its aftermath.  He said that terrorists “staying in the airplane” that was to hit a building could not described as “cowardly.”  Since that time Maher has been has been doing Real Time With Bill Maher on HBO where he has always been careful not to be anti-corporate and has, as well, been careful about what he says about 9/11.

    •    James Risen- Risen was a reporter for the New York Times.  He and another Times reporter, Eric Lichtblau, wrote a story about the  secret illegal and unconstitutional surveillance of the American public by the George W. Bush administration that won the New York Times a Pulitzer Prize in 2006, but the Times originally suppressed that story.  Risen now works for the Intercept.

    •    Robert Parry- An award-wining American investigative journalist (and finalist for the 1985 Pulitzer Prize) best known for his role in covering the Iran-Contra affair for the Associated Press (AP) and Newsweek.  In 1995, Parry self-exiled himself from mainstream media to found Consortium News (the Consortium for Independent Journalism Inc.)

    •    Ed Schultz- Fired from the position if MSNBC in the spring of 2014 host after bridling about things such as directions he received from MSNBC management concerning what to cover and not to cover, including directions not to cover the Bernie Sanders campaign, including Sanders’ announcement that he was going to run for president.  Schultz now works for RT where he says he has far more freedom to cover what he wants how he wants.

•        Gary Webb- A journalist forced to resign from the San Jose Mercury News in 1997 and subsequently railroaded out of journalism with the CIA working at it in the background after Webb wrote a 1996 series uncovering the CIA's role in importing cocaine into the U.S. to secretly fund the Nicaraguan Contra rebels through the manufacture and sale of drugs in the U.S.  Pressured to drop pursuit of his story Webb published his evidence in the series "Dark Alliance" for which the national Society of Professional Journalists voted Webb "Journalist of the Year" for 1996.  Webb had earlier contributed Pulitzer Prize winning work at the paper.   He subsequently experienced a vicious smear campaign during which he found himself defending his integrity, his career, his family that ended in his unfortunate death.  Later revelations about CIA involvement in illegal drugs coming into the United States validated and amplified what Webb was the first to report.

    •    Seymour Hersh- It is observed that Hersh has been “increasingly marginalised and his work denigrated” although he once worked for the New York Times Washington Bureau to report such stories as the Watergate scandal, and exposed the My Lai Massacre and the US military’s abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.  Hersh has been forced from one outlet to another, each outlet more remote from where U.S. citizens are likely to learn what he is reporting: Publication of Hersh's work has moved from the New Yorker, to the London Review of Books to the German publication, Welt am Sonntag.  Thus the American public is unlikely to learn about Hersh's most recent reporting that although a sarin gas chemical weapons attack in Syria was used as an excuse for Trump's recent order of a “retaliatory” strike against the country, there was zero evidence of such an attack.  Similarly, previously reporting, based on what Hersh's contacts within the security and intelligence establishments, revealed that Assad's alleged use of sarin gas in Ghouta, outside Damascus in 2013 also failed to stand up to scrutiny.  In between the Hersh's reporting on these alleged sarin attacks mainstream media reacted in a suspectly ostracizing way to Hersh's scoop about ways in which the public was misled respecting the reported killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.  Even in the London Review of Books the bin laden story immediately attracted so much attention it reportedly crashed the LRB servers. (In the fascinating Netflix "Wormwood" documentary by Errol Morris, which is about the still mysterious 1953 death, subsequent coverup and probable assassination by our government of an American scientist and Central Intelligence Agency employee participating in a secret government biological warfare program, Mr. Hersh explains what he is and isn't willing to report about events within the very secret intelligence community without sufficient sourcing.)

    •    Peter Arnett (and Producers April Oliver & Jack Smith)- Arnet, a Pulitzer Price who worked for CNN for 18 years and was famous for reporting from Baghdad during the Gulf War was, he said “muzzled,” and then fired by CNN, like his producers April Oliver and Jack Smith they did entitled "Valley of Death," (and a more senior producer resigned), because of an investigative report (a joint production of CNN and Time magazine), presenting evidence about how Army special forces venturing into Laos in September of 1970 used sarin gas in an operation to kill American soldiers who had defected into Laos from Vietnam.

•        Dan Rather (and his producer Mary Mapes)-  Dan Rather and others including his "60 Minutes" program producer Mary Mapes were fired by CBS (Rather's was a slow-burn firing) when covering the 2004 presidential election campaign they were subject to criticism for alleged liberal bias in reporting a basically true story about preferential treatment of George W. Bush in the National Guard (1968 to 1973 during which time Bush did not show up for a medical exam and stopped fulfilling his flying commitments).  The criticism leading up to the firing focused on the fact that documents with which the newspeople had been supplied to support their story were likely faked in whole or in part by somebody, possibly in a dirty trick intended to sucker them.  When a 2015 feature film, "Truth," starring Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford was made dramatizing the issues and events with respect to the firing CBS refused to run advertisements for it.

 •        Chris Hedges- Hedges was another award winning journalist working with a team to win a Pulitzer Prize for the New York Times in 2002.  Amnesty International gave him an award that year for international journalism.  He’s worked for Christian Science Monitor, NPR and was a foreign correspondent for the Times for fifteen years.  Hedges, under pressure from the Times, was forced to leave the Times in 2003 (listen at 14 minutes) because he had been denouncing the those urging the U.S. forward to its invasion of Iraq.  (Hedges was an early critic of the war.- We invaded in March of 2003.)  Hedges now writes for Truthdig and is a host of “On Contact” for RT.          

 •        Ashleigh Banfield-  NBC fired news journalist Ashleigh Banfield, host of “MSNBC Investigates,” from MSNBC in 2004 after officially scolding her in the spring of 2003, and thereupon banishing her, because she criticized her TV news colleagues for “sugarcoating Iraq war coverage with patriotism and not showing the reality of the conflict.”  She had criticized  “cable news operators who wrap themselves in the American flag and go after a certain target demographic.”

 •        Marc Lamont Hill- In November, 2018, Mr. Hill, an American academic, author, activist, and television personality, a Professor of Media Studies and Urban Education at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was fired from his position as a commentator for CNN twenty-four hours after he expressed his opinion on the Arab–Israeli conflict before the U.N. saying that Palestinians have a right to resist their occupation by Israel through international boycotts of Israel and to defend themselves from the Israeli military.  This point of view was considered unacceptably anti-Israel (while some tried to cast his view as being antisemitic). The coverage by FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, is especially insightful and detailed, plus it includes a call to action.

 •         William M. Arkin- (Added after January 2019 resignation)- We will see whether William M. Arkin who resigned NBC with his 2,228-word farewell “blistering critique” of what he calls “perpetual war” and the “creeping fascism of homeland security” stays self-exiled from NBC and the rest of the mainstream, corporately-owned media.  He may not have a choice.  Arkin was clear his critique “applies to all of the mainstream networks,” CNN, Fox, etc, not just NBC.  And Arkin said he wanted to “step back” and “think about how we can end this era of perpetual war and how we can build some real security, both in the United States and abroad.”  Arkin pointed out that, in the prior year, the United States has been bombing (listing them) nine countries (ten if we include, as we should, the U.S. participation in the bombing of Yemen).

 •        Tareq Haddad- (added December 2019)- Tareq Haddad resigned from Newsweek at the end of 2019 because Newsweek and its senior editors were burying a scandal.  The scandal was about the covering up of evidence, now with an every greater number of whistleblowers from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons coming forward, that a supposed chemical attack in Duoma, Syria, supposedly by the Assad regime, was faked to provoke the United States to escalate military actions in the country.  Haddad’s furnished a very detailed account, complete with screen shots of emails from his senior editors, of how his story was suppressed and how Newsweek mobilized with not so subtle efforts to communicate that he was out of line to think these kinds of stories should get published.  Haddad said about suppression of information by mainstream corporate media (providing evidence he cited) that "The U.S. government, in an ugly alliance with those the profit the most from war, has its tentacles in every part of the media — imposters, with ties to the U.S. State Department . .  filter out what can or cannot be reported. Inconvenient stories are completely blocked."

The Influence of Media Ownership On Content As Foreseen By Paddy Chayefsky’s Network (And How Fitting That The Pivotal “Voice-of-God” Scene Was Filmed In One of World’s Greatest Libraries)

Scene filmed in great world library: Peter Finch playing Howard Beale escorted by Robert Duvall as network executive Frank Hackett to meet Arthur Jensen, Chairman of the owning conglomerate, played by Ned Beatty.

It’s a scene filmed in one of the greatest libraries of the world (at least, it was then) and it is also important to talk about that scene in terms of some very important matters concerning libraries.  This is something we’ll come back to . . .

Watching Paddy Chayefsky’s masterful film “Network” again it is remarkable to think that it was written and made as long ago as it was.  It came out in 1976 Gol Darn it!  (Chayefsky’s “mad as hell” script would have used actual swear words.) The thing that makes it such a devilishly clever satire is the way that it moves in undetectable micro increments from the sane actual world we once thought we were living in to a shudderingly ghastly caricature of what the world might be in the process of becoming without ever letting you put your finger on exactly where the line was being crossed to move between the two.

It’s a testament to screenwriter Chayefsky’s perspicacious insights about society’s direction at the time that the film still works now at least as well as it did when it was first released. If anything, the seemingly increasing transgressive absurdities of life and shifting norms of 2018 might have us wondering whether the crossover point in the film where you can pinpoint that happening has actually moved: A reality TV star president who was elected in an election where the head of the CBS network commented with shameless accuracy about the unremitting, nonstop media coverage of Trump's campaign for office: “It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS.”
                    
Rewatching “Network” might also reveal another startling fact to people who have been engaged in trying to save New York’s public libraries recently: A pivotal scene in the film [Spoiler Alert!] occurs in the 42nd Street Central Reference Library.  It was filmed in the Trustees opulent meeting room and on the grand Carrère & Hastings designed central staircase leading up to the room.  There is even a brief glimpse into the adjacent office of the NYPL president.

Scenes from "Network" filmed in the NYPL's trustees room (including a glimpse of the NYPL president's office) and then, current day, the NYPL trustees meeting in the room.  Also, the Thomas Jefferson inscription over the fireplace and the dedication of the building to serve the public.

The scene is where the Howard Beale character, the crazed former news anchor played by Peter Finch in the role for which he posthumously won best actor, hears the voice of God.  He undergoes a conversion as a result that sets up the film’s final denouement.  Beale doesn’t hear actual voice of God; he hears the voice of capitalism pretending to be God and bring him enlightenment that allows him to preach its gospel.  What he actually hears is the voice of Arthur Jensen (played by Ned Beatty) the Chairman of the global conglomerate that has acquired the network on which Beale is now a rating’s success as the “mad prophet of the airwaves.”

“Enlightened,” Beale about-faces from his populist message to preach the new capital establishment-praising dogma and his ratings plunge, but Chairman Jensen, personally a fan of this new skew to Beale’s script won’t allow Beale’s show to be cancelled.  This plot pivot deftly allows Chayefsky a jump that skewers the effects of corporate ownership on media content from two directions: First, as the movie had done up to that point, it skewered the pursuit of corporate profit-at-any-social-cost as seen in the chase of ratings down the swirling drain of lowest common denominator bad taste, and then it flips to skewer the penchant for wealth and corporate capitalism to want to narcissistically bask in laudatory self compliment even if delivery of that package is insincerely just purchased and paid for.

For starker relief, this satiric critique is presented against the backdrop of a mythically imagined legacy of great newsmen, sober gentlemen in the mold of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid, who were sagaciously grounded in the notion that there is a sacred obligation to transmit the news with fidelity.  Not that the real state of affairs things at CBS News and elsewhere in the news media influencing our country were historically ever exactly what they seemed when the mythos of that veneer was being polished.  Nevertheless, in the early scenes of the film, the pitch perfect performances of William Holden playing Max Schumacher and Peter Finch playing Beale (before his madness flowers) do evoke the gravitas of such men that in a previous time it felt were so reassuring and reliable to have at the helm of the Fourth Estate looking out for our interests as if they were obligated by a public trust.

 -   In case anyone has forgotten, the nation’s broadcasting airwaves are supposed to be a public trust, actually a public commons owned by the American public itself, not the corporations who now control it and treat it as their private property to be bought, sold and used any way they will. Additionally, the model for ownership and tending of the airwaves didn’t have to be one where this precious asset was handed off to profit making corporations controlling virtually everything and wanting to direct all your attention to advertising.  There were other possible non-profit models that could have taken hold.  (Read Tim Wu’s books the “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires” and the “The Attention Merchants: The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads.”)

We remember Michael Moore with his characteristic glee explaining what he saw to be the Achilles heel of capitalism in his ability to get his message out: So long as I am making a profit for them, they don’t pay attention to what I say. .  And so, he said, he could keep saying it.  (If you find a link for this send it to us please.)  That bravado is somewhat contradicted by what almost happened to Moore and his anti-George W. Bush message when his publisher wanted to pulp unpublished his book “Stupid White Men: ...And Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!”  The publisher viewed its point of view as unsuitable for the post 9/11 era.  The book became a best seller and thus made a huge profit for his publisher, but had to be rescued by brave librarians focusing on principles quite apart from the pursuit of profit who were the only reason it wound up being published.
 
The ability to get a message out and to get out content that has trenchant integrity is an escalating concern in our world given the increasing conglomeration of the media giants and the dwindling number of owners particularly when you consider questions about the way such conglomerates engaged in all sorts of other businesses may see things.  For instance, AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner is regarded as a first significant beachhead for a wave of further consolidations of media company ownership.  It generated an article in the New York Times about the possible fate HBO’s future production culture and content:

Media analysts and tech-industry prognosticators look at AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner and wonder about the future of an industry in flux. Hollywood looks at the deal and wonders what’s going to happen to HBO.

See: New York Times- Will AT&T Be Able to Handle HBO? By John Koblin, June 14, 2018.
       
In the article, “Richard Plepler, the smooth-talking, perpetually tanned chief executive of HBO” bravely envisioned that HBO would escape ownership directed change because such an escape was needed for HBO to succeed at what it does, referring to “Mr. Plepler’s view that HBO needs to be left alone in order to thrive.”  More specifically:

“You have to have a Chinese wall between the creative process and everything else,” Mr. Plepler told The New York Times shortly after the deal was announced in 2016. He added that he would be “very surprised” if AT&T did not embrace that.

Of course, the movie “Network” is very much about so-called “Chinese walls,” or the actual lack thereof when it comes to media ownership, first when the business oriented corporate types want to take over network’s news division to make it more of an infotainment ratings success and then later when Chairman Arthur Jensen wants his voice-of-God capitalism gospel preached to the world.  In real life, the corporate types at Networks have leaned hard on the news divisions to suppress news.  Two of the movie docudramas about journalism, “The Insider” (about trying to broadcast a whistle-blower’s revelations about tobacco company lies) and “Truth” (about reporting events leading up to the firing of CBS news anchor Dan Rather and his “60 Minutes” producer Mary Mapes) concern what were actually real life events. . . . 

“Truth” focuses on altercations between Rather, Mapes and their team and the corporate types at CBS in the lead up to their forced departure from the CBS network, but they had altercations before that.   Just recently on Democracy Now, legendary reporter Sy Hersh described how sitting on “photographs of torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib” for weeks the corporate people running the CBS network didn’t want Rather and Mapes to run the news story that was unflattering to the government:

They had had it for two weeks. [And they didn’t run it.]  But, you know, the people doing it, the reporters, Dan Rather and Mary Mapes, the producers, wanted to. But the suits stopped them.

It took a deal to forcing publication with the story coming out simultaneous elsewhere.  Said Hersh of the subsequent Rather and Mapes firings: “It’s too bad. It’s not good to be good at your job in network television. That’s my theory.”

By contrast, Mr. Plepler, head of HBO thinks that at HBO the talent of being good at your job is integral to its success:

“It’s very much part of the DNA of HBO: Talent is sacred,” Mr. Plepler said after the AT&T deal was announced. “They bring the magic into our company. Writers, producers, actors. It’s their gifts that make HBO HBO. It’s pretty clear to anybody who looks at our company from afar — and, in AT&T’s case, more closely — we are a talent-centric place.”

In what could be construed as a plea to his possible future boss, he added: “I can’t imagine, with everything that Randall made clear to us, why would you ever change a winning game? I don’t think they have any intention of doing so.”

(Not mentioned in the article is that a fair amount of HBO's content is also political.)

But is it ever just so simple as declaring an expectation that the ownership of our media will stay on the other side of a “Chinese Wall” and won’t interfere?  Gothamist publisher Jake Dobkin was a panelist at a June 18, 2018 Brooklyn Historical Society discussion about local news in New York City: “RIP Local News?”  In his opening remarks Dobkin spoke about what happened with a planned merger of  DNAInfo and Gothamist, two local news web outlets that, with an acquisition of the Gothamist were both under the ownership of billionaire Joe Rickets. Dobkin explained that the shutdown of both sites by Ricketts, instead of a merger, that occurred when the employees unionized, was unanticipated because it was unanticipated that the employees would unionize.  Dobkin made it seem unfortunate, almost sad that they did unionize.  Mr. Ricketts, a Trump-supporting conservative Republican owner, has a deep antipathy towards unions.  The shutdown was especially scary when it occurred because it raised the possibility all the past reporting on the sites was about to vanish permanently.  In fact, for a while it seemed to; and it could have.

Explaining the misfortune of the shutdowns, Dobkin told the Brooklyn Historical Society that the “owner. .  had never involved himself in the politics of the site.”  Afterwards, noting his statement about Mr. Ricketts non-involvement with the “politics of the site,” we asked Dobkin about reports that even before the unionization occurred, news and information on the acquired site written about Mr. Rickets, was eliminated or rewritten.  Mr. Dobkin dismissed the importance of the reports saying that it was only a few articles and that he had done it with the hope that people would have jobs and be able to feed their families.  In other words, an owner doesn’t even have to ask before editors try to intuit what they may need to do to keep their jobs and livelihoods afloat.

Are you feeling glutted by monopolist mergers?  This week tech columnist Brian X. Chen wrote a column in the New Times, “With Latest Acquisitions, Amazon Continues Its Quest for World Domination,” asking “Does anyone else feel that Amazon is slowly taking over the world?”

Chen noted how Amazon was giving discounts on groceries at Whole Foods to those who became Amazon Prime members, how Amazon had also gained, through its acquisition of PillPack, a license to start shipping pharmaceutical prescriptions in all 50 states, and how it was planning to start up its own delivery services, an “army,” to compete with FedEx, United Parcel Service and the United States Postal Service.  Amazon and its owner Jeff Bezos are also part of media conglomerate universe.  Bezos owns The Washington Post, the most important newspaper in the nation’s capital.  Amazon started by selling books, led people into digital books, ‘kindling” there interest, and sells a vast amount of all other content at its site.  It is now making films while often being a sole source for video streaming much of the historical/vintage content you would once find in the video stores that have gone out of business around the country.

We are told that Mr. Bezos doesn’t want to “control the editorial product” at the Washington Post, that the only micro-management stuff at the paper with which he likes to get weightily involved is “on wonky issues like web-page load time and ease of subscription sign-ups.”  We are even told that the Washington Post wrote a lengthy 2017 article “suggesting that Amazon could become a dangerous monopoly” that Mr. Bezos did not react to. (Gee, Amazon really could?- That might happen in the future?)

There is a certain extreme irony when it comes to writing denials that Mr. Bezos as Washington Post owner will exercise any influence over editorial content at the Post at the very same time that theaters were playing Spielberg’s Oscar-contending “The Post” dramatically lauding the courage of the central character, Katherine Graham, former Washington Post owner, Mr. Bezos’ predecessor, in deciding what content the newspaper would and would not publish when it was presented with the Pentagon Papers. If you want to see the film now, you can get it through Amazon.

Furthermore, one has to figure that the Washington Post almost has to print at least one article about Amazon’s monopolistic tendencies and exploits to help inoculate itself against criticism that such ownership is having exactly the kind of censorship effect.  The test is not whether the Post writes about monopoly and Amazon, but whether any of the legislators in Washington that the Post regularly covers carefully takes up that concern as a cause.  They haven’t.  Lastly, there is also a lot more to criticize about Amazon concerning the immense amount of data it is collecting on everybody in the country and its ties with the CIA and U.S. military.                         

Both these pieces about media monopolies ran in the same edition of the New York Times this week.

Not feeling sufficiently glutted by these mergers yet?  The same day that Brian X. Chen wondered in his Times column whether people noticed that Amazon was taking over the world, the Times ran an editorial noting troublingly that the Disney-Fox merger sailed through exceptionally fast: Opinion- The Disney-Fox Deal Sails Through, a Bit Too Easily, by The Editorial Board, July 1, 2018.  Said the Times:

Government officials appear unconcerned that the combined Disney-Fox will account for about half of the box office revenue nationally this year and about 30 percent of scripted TV programming, according to the Writers Guild of America West, a Hollywood labor union.

    * * * *

 . .  antitrust regulators and judges are usually . . . dubious of horizontal deals like Disney-Fox. In these cases, it’s much easier to show that the combined company would have the power to raise prices and limit choices. In the movie business, for example, Disney already wields considerable clout — its studios accounted for more than a third of box office sales in the first five months of the year. The additional 15 percent share of box office sales that the company will gain through this deal no doubt will increase Disney’s clout when it negotiates with movie-theater chains. For instance, the company might be able to demand top billing for its movies and a bigger share of revenue than smaller studios get. According to a handful of theater owners who talked to The Wall Street Journal last year, Disney has already engaged in such tactics, forcing them to accept more onerous terms if they wanted to show its blockbuster “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”

As for ownership and influence?  The Times noted speculation about whether politics came into play in the Trump administration’s rushed approval.  It noted something to be concerned about Trump-supporting Rupert Murdoch and his family: 

While Disney will not acquire Fox News or the Fox network and stations as part of this deal, the acquisition will make the Murdoch family the largest individual shareholders in Disney, increasing their wealth by billions of dollars.

And the gospel that Murdoch and family will want preached?

Now to conclude with an observation we simply must make: Isn’t it bizarrely appropriate that Paddy Chayefsky’s pivotal voice-of-God scene was filmed in the trustees meeting room one of the world’s greatest libraries with that trustees room masquerading as a corporate board room? . . .

As our New York City libraries are being plundered and shut down, their books eliminated, people are, perforce, and quite likely even by plan, being pushed out to the corporately owned media for their alternatives.  The decisions that shut down and plunder our libraries and banish their books while pushing people more and more into the arms and the technology of the new media empires are being made by boards of trustees that look a lot like multiplied versions of the Arthur Jensen character that Chayefsky’s scripting (and the location scout) put into that library trustees room.  The motivations and rationalizations of these new library trustees are increasingly corporate and free market enterprise-deifying in the same way.

As the public is pushed out and away from the traditional resources of public, nonprofit libraries what will we get instead?: The latest glitz that profit-minded corporations are pushing?  Or will we get their stories about how splendid monopolistic capitalism is?

Unfortunately, whatever we get and will have to live with is real.  It’s not satire.