that was not good enough. [CIA Director] Casey called ABC Chairman Leonard
H. Goldenson. The call led to three meetings between ABC officials and
Stanley Sporkin, CIA general counsel. On November 21, 1984, despite all the
documented evidence presented in the program, Peter Jennings reported that
ABC could no longer substantiate the charges, and that "We have no reason to
doubt the CIA's denial." He presented no evidence supporting the CIA's
position.  P. 327

That same day, the CIA filed a formal complaint, written by Sporkin and
signed by Casey, with the Federal Communications Commission charging that
ABC had "deliberately distorted" the news.  In the complaint, Casey asked
that ABC be stripped of its TV and radio Licenses.  This was the first time
in the history of the country that a government agency had formally attacked
the press.  Yet, there was no uproar. P. 328

During this time, Capital Cities Communications was maneuvering to buy ABC.
[CIA Director] Casey was one of the founders of Cap Cities.  Cap Cities
bought ABC for $3.5 billion, which was called a "bargain rate" by the trade
media.  Besides Casey, two other founders of Cap Cities had extensive ties
to the intelligence community.  Within months, the entire investigative unit
[of ABC] was dispersed, and the commentator on the Rewald program was
assigned to covering beauty pageants.  Needless to say, my contract was not
renewed.  P. 328, 329
___________________________________________________________________

Carl Jensen, Ph.D., founder and director emeritus of Project Censored,
America's longest running research project on news media censorship, has
been involved with the media for more than 50 years as a daily newspaper
reporter, weekly newspaper publisher, public relations practitioner,
advertising executive, educator, and author.  Jensen is author of the
1990-1996 annual Project Censored yearbooks, Censored: The News That Didn't
Make the News.and Why.  He has won numerous awards for his work.

There were 50 major media corporations in 1993, and now there are only about
half a dozen.  Corporate socialization has been exacerbated by the
multibillion-dollar, megamedia mergers that created international giants
such as AOL Time Warner, Disney, General Electric, News Corporation, and
Viacom.  P. 344

Shortly after the outbreak of the First Terrorist War of the 21st Century, I
was reminded of what US Senator Hiram Johnson said during World War I: "The
first casualty when war comes, is truth."  Post-September 11, 2001, the free
flow of information in America is slowing to a carefully monitored trickle.
The president of the US says he can only trust eight members of Congress.
The attorney general admonishes Congress to pass the controversial
Anti-Terrorism Act without debate.  The national security adviser cautions
TV networks not to broadcast press conferences with Taliban leaders because
they may contain hidden messages.  The military tells the press [that it]
can't observe the 1992 agreement allowing the media more access to
information.  The president's press secretary warns the media and all
Americans to watch what they say and watch what they do.  These are ominous
signs for democracy.  P. 349

In the same way that we survived Pearl Harbor, we will survive the September
11 terrorist attack.  In the meantime, let us not be terrorized into giving
up any of our constitutionally guaranteed rights.  P. 350
________________________________________________________________

Robert McChesney has written or edited seven books and is currently research
professor at the Institute of Communications Research at the University of
Illinois.  He has made more than 500 radio and TV appearances and has been
the subject of nearly 50 published profiles and interviews.

Professional journalism had three distinct biases built into it, biases that
remain to this day.  First, it regarded anything done by official sources,
for example, government officials and prominent public figures, as the basis
for legitimate news.  Second, professional journalism posited that there had
to be a news hook or a news peg to justify a news story.  [This] helped to
stimulate the birth and rapid rise of the public relations (PR) industry.
Surveys show that PR accounts for anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of what
appears as news.  The third bias is that [professional journalism] smuggles
in values conducive to the commercial aims of the owners and advertisers as
well as the political aims of the owning class.  The affairs of government
are subjected to much closer scrutiny than the affairs of big business.  The
genius of professionalism in journalism is that it tends to make journalists
oblivious to the compromises with authority they routinely make.  P. 367-369

Professional news media invariable take it as a given that the US has a
right to invade any country it wishes for whatever reason it may have.
Professional journalism equates the spread of "free markets" with
the spread
of democracy.  To the US elite, however, democracy tends to be defined by
their ability to maximize profit in a nation, and that is, in effect, the
standard of professional journalism.  P. 369, 370

[There] is the striking consolidation of the media from hundreds of
significant firms to an integrated industry dominated by less than ten
enormous transnational conglomerates and rounded out by no more than another
fifteen very large firms.  The first tier giants include AOL Time Warner,
Disney, Viacom, News Corporation, Bertelsmann, Vivendi Universal, Sony,
AT&T, and General Electric.  The nine or ten largest media conglomerates now
almost all rank among the 300 largest firms in the world; in 1965, there
were barely any media firms among the five hundred largest companies in the
world.  P. 371, 372

The largest ten media firms own all the US television networks, most of the
TV stations in the largest markets, all the major film studios, all the
major music companies, nearly all of the cable TV channels, much of the book
and magazine publishing [industry], and much, much more.  The logic of media
industries is that a firm can no longer compete if it is not part of a
larger conglomerate.  General Electric's NBC is the only commercial TV
network that does not own a major Hollywood film studio.  P. 372

Expensive investigative journalism-especially that which goes after powerful
corporate or national security interests-is discouraged.  Idiotic or largely
irrelevant human interest/tragedy stories get the green light for extensive
coverage.  These are cheap, easy to cover, and they never antagonize those
in power.  The media companies claim they are responding to demand.  P. 373

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, real income declined or was stagnant for the
lower 60 percent, while wealth and income for the rich skyrocketed.  By
1998, discounting home ownership, the top 10 percent of the population
claimed 76 percent of the nation's net worth.  More than half of this is
accounted for by the richest 1 percent.  The Washington Post has gone so far
as to describe ours as a nearly "perfect economy."  And it does appear more
and more perfect the higher one goes up the socioeconomic ladder.  P. 375

The rate of incarceration has more than doubled since the late 1980s. The US
now has five times more prisoners per capita than Canada and seven times
more than the whole of Western Europe. The US has 5 percent of the world's
population and 25 percent of the world's prisoners. Nearly 90 percent of
prisoners are jailed for nonviolent offenses, often casualties of the
so-called drug war. It is a debate among Democrats and Republicans over who
can be "tougher" on crime, hire more police, and build more
prisons.  Almost
overnight, the prison-industrial complex has become a big business and a
powerful lobby for public funds.  P. 376

In the year 2000, a Texas man received 16 years in prison for stealing a
Snickers candy bar, while four executives at Hoffman-LaRoche were found
guilty of conspiring to suppress and eliminate competition in the vitamin
industry in what the Justice Department called perhaps the largest criminal
antitrust conspiracy in history.  The four executives were fined anywhere
from $75,000 to $350,000.  They received prison terms ranging from three all
the way up to four months.  P. 377

The propagandistic nature of the war coverage was made crystal clear by AOL
Time Warner's CNN a few weeks after the war began in Afghanistan.  CNN
president Walter Isaacson authorized CNN to provide two different versions
of the war: a more critical one for the global audience and a sugarcoated
one for Americans.  Isaacson instructed the domestic CNN to be certain that
any story that might undermine support for the US war be balanced with a
reminder that the war on terrorism is a response to the heinous attacks of
September 11.  P. 380

We need to press for the overhaul of the media system, so that it serves
democratic values rather than the interests of capital.  The US media system
has nothing to do with the wishes of the Founding Fathers and even less to
do with the workings of some alleged free market.  To the contrary, the
media system is the result of laws, government subsidies, and regulations
made in the public's name, but made corruptly behind closed doors without
the public's informed consent.  The largest media firms are all built on top
of the profits generated by government gifts of monopoly rights.  It is
impossible to conceive of a better world with a media system that remains
under the thumb of Wall Street and Madison Avenue, under the thumb of the
owning class.  It is nearly impossible to conceive of a better world without
some changes in the media status quo.  We have no time to waste.  P. 381
_________________________________________________________________

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