Fishwrapper - Stuffing our minds with garbage

“The lowest form of popular culture — lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives — has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”

-- Carl Bernstein, ex-Washington Post Watergate reporter

You were dumbed down and stuffed with garbage last week by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which is acting along with its Cox masters as a fifth column on behalf of one of the Bush administration’s many forays against democracy.

That’s significant because, on June 2, the Federal Communications Commission will undoubtedly vote to remove almost all restraints on media monopolies. With the FCC’s blessing, Cox’s cash registers will cha-ching billions of dollars in windfall profits following the latest pirating of the public’s airwaves. But you won’t learn that by reading the AJC, which seems to have different rules for its Coxopoly than it does for other businesses.

Here are the details on last week’s tawdry little Cox Misadventure: An online political activist group, MoveOn.org, had purchased TV air time for 10 spots a day in 23 cities, including Phoenix, where one tentacle of the Atlanta media conglomerate, Cox Communications, owns the cable franchise.

MoveOn’s spots are a harsh, but completely fair, scolding aimed at Bush’s planned tax cuts. Those cuts will overwhelmingly benefit the rich, and will add to Bush’s record-breaking deficits; that debt will have to be paid off by your children and grandchildren.

The MoveOn commercials feature a re-enactment of a blood drive last month in Portland, Ore., where parents lined up to open their veins to help pay for disastrously underfunded schools. The ads state: “Bush wants to cut $9 billion from education to pay for more tax cuts for the rich. Is this the America we want to live in?”

Keep in mind that the media giants, to one degree or another, are busily lobbying and pandering to the Bush regime to ensure nothing derails the FCC decision. Cox is one of the most slavish in, for example, giving a pleasant spin to Bush’s war. Also, the outfit is one of the most aggressive and free-spending in lobbying Congress and the administration, not that Cox ever acknowledges its influence peddling in its own media. (See www.publicintegrity.org/ dtaweb/downloads/otr.pdf for the full story on what Big Media doesn’t tell you about its lobbying and legislative agendas.)

Apparently, Cox Communications execs got faint at the idea of such a pointed criticism of Bush — and soooo close to the FCC decision. Thus, they yanked the ads, claiming they “were in poor taste” and “too controversial.” Please. That’s just plain rubbish from a company that wallowed during the last election in the megabucks it charged for some of the slimiest political advertising in history.

Eventually, after the public and the press got wind of Cox’s censorship, the commercials did run. But the Coxites now have plausible deniability when begging the government’s favor. “Hey, we tried to keep the public ignorant,” they can tell the administration.

The tiff merited headlines across the nation. Associated Press flashed the news over the wires. Daily newspapers from Phoenix to Miami ran stories, as did trade publications.

Meanwhile, Cox Communications was holding its annual shareholders’ meeting in Atlanta. The AJC reported on mind-numbing, minor news about the meeting, of interest to absolutely no one but the handful who own Cox stock. Somehow, the newspaper entirely forgot to mention a far sexier Cox Communications story: the attempt to censor the MoveOn commercials.

The Coxopoly didn’t want you to know.

An article on the front of the AJC’s May 13 business section finally let its readers know — sort of — what CL readers have known for weeks. It was headlined “Looser media rules drafted/Landmark plan by FCC staff would let companies add to television holdings significantly,” and it related the FCC’s plans to hand its deregulatory gift to the media monopolies.

The story was a pick-up from The New York Times. That’s OK — although curious because Cox’s Washington bureau does have a reporter who covers the FCC. The Times story was slightly truncated; largely technical details were trimmed from the bottom.

Plus, one — and only one — sentence was excised from the top part of the article. That sentence read: “Others, like the Tribune Company and the Gannett Company, might seek to acquire broadcasters or newspapers in cities where they already have a presence.”

Hmmmm. Why that sentence?

Prior to the Tribune-Gannett sentence, the Times story mentions some of the companies, such as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., that might rapidly expand after the FCC finishes crafting its new media landscape. Following the sentence, the Times comments that media brokers are already revving the engines for a series of gargantuan acquisitions and mergers.

Had the sentence remained, savvy readers might have mused: Well, in addition to the Tribune Company and Gannett (which, like Cox are newspaper chains first and TV chains second), what about Cox? It already owns the daily newspaper here, and WSB-TV and WSB-FM. Is it planning to swallow more?

That’s quite likely, according to Chris Yoo, a Vanderbilt University law professor who is an expert in the proposed FCC rule changes. In fact, Cox could add at least two more TV stations to its dominance of the Atlanta market, according to some versions of the FCC proposals.

That’s not a secret — except here in Atlanta. Even another Cox paper, The Palm Beach Post, has reported on the company’s lust for greater monopolies in cities where it owns media.

Paraphrasing Florida Broadcasters Association President Patrick Roberts, the Post reported in January that “the Tribune Co. and Cox Enterprises have been two major proponents of loosening the FCC’s grip.” Damn, never read that in the AJC. (I hope the Post reporter kept her job for such audacious truth-telling.) “As soon as it happens, within 30 days a mammoth number of deals will be announced,” Roberts told the Post.

Don’t you think people in the Coxopoly’s home plantation might be interested to know that their media overseer was about to be one of those involved in a “mammoth number of deals”? By deleting the single sentence from the Times story on the FCC, the AJC reduced the very major role of the newspaper industry in the seismic media changes to a passing, hardly noticeable reference in the story’s second to the last paragraph.

The word “Cox” was never mentioned (even though the AJC typically “localizes” similar wire stories when they might affect other local companies), and nowhere can the reader find the slightest whiff that the company has an interest in the outcome of the FCC decision. Nor, scouring months of past AJCs, will a reader ever be enlightened as to Cox’s very real and very big stake in media deregulation. By comparison, more ethical companies, such as the Tribune Co., which owns The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and other papers, aggressively reported their self-interest in the FCC rule change proposals.

What the Cox folks are aggressive at is circling their computer terminals to ward off criticism. Cox Newspaper CEO Jay Smith, and the AJC’s editor, Julia Wallace, and managing editor, Hank Klibanoff, were provided detailed questions on issues in this column. They didn’t respond, something politicians and others might want to remember the next time they’re pushed for response by an AJC reporter.

Cox is a company that rules by unscrupulous force. I watched it betray the people of Miami in 1988, by breaking a 22-year-old contract to “preserve” The Miami News. In making a mockery of anti-trust exemptions it had obtained, Cox also betrayed its business partner, Knight-Ridder Inc. Using a greenmail threat to take over Knight-Ridder, Cox forced a renegotiation of its partnership and slyly inserted provisions that allowed it to make as much as $300 million through 2021 by closing the News. Cox would have made millions, just not as many millions, by keeping the faith with Miami and preserving a valuable newspaper voice.

Legendary Knight-Ridder news executive John McMullan commented at the time that Cox, while shrewd, has “dumb business management.”

And it’s that dumb management that leads Cox to believe that it can keep the truth from you. Citizens who understand that democracy’s life or death hinges on the survival of many media voices should vigorously oppose the FCC changes. Moreover, they should call for a rollback on previous media consolidation. In 1975, the FCC sought to preserve a multiplicity of voices and banned companies from owning daily newspapers and TV stations in the same city; Cox was granted an exemption based in part on a promise to run its near-monopoly in the public interest.

That promise has long been a joke in Atlanta — and nothing better illustrates Cox’s disdain for the public interest than trying to black out news of its involvement and interest in the imminent FCC changes.

Citizens, meanwhile, should demand that the FCC force Cox to divest itself of either the newspaper or the TV station. That’s the only way we can stop Cox from, as Carl Bernstein says, stuffing our brains with garbage.

Senior Editor John Sugg acknowledges that Cox owns 25 percent of CL’s parent company — “but we’re going to get that stock back,” he vows. Sugg can be reached at 404-614-1241 or at john.sugg@creativeloafing.com. An FCC hearing on media deregulation will be held in Atlanta — May 21, 6:30 p.m., at Emory University’s Glenn Memorial auditorium.