News Corporation

Thomas R. Eddlem ~ Citizens United Is Breaking Up Corporate Dominance Of Elections

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The New American | June 26 2012

Actress Angelina Jolie speaks during a symposium on international law and justice at the Council on Foreign Relations, Oct. 17, 2008 in New York: AP Images

With the 2012 political season heating up, many people are calling for a ban on the SuperPacs created in the wake of the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United decision. A few on the left have even called for a constitutional amendment to ban corporations from making political advertisements, for fear that corporations have come to dominate elections in the United States.

In one sense, they are right. But it’s not the SuperPacs. The corporations that have been dominating the public debate for decades are the media empires. Right now, six corporations control most of the television, radio, and print publishing networks that Americans see on a daily basis. They drive the debate, and the social issues behind the debate.

  • ABC/Disney runs ABC News, as well as a large number of local and cable television stations, theme  parks, and movie studios.
  • Time-Warner owns CNN, TNT, and a whole slew of cable television stations, Warner Brothers movie studios, plus a large number of magazines, including Time, People, and Sports Illustrated.
  • NewsCorp runs Fox News, a radio news network, 20th Century Fox movie studios, and dozens of newspapers and book publishers.
  • NBCUniversal is jointly owned by Comcast and General Electric, one of the largest corporations in America. It runs the NBC network, MSNBC, a large selection of cable channels, Universal theme parks, and digital media.
  • Viacom owns a variety of cable television channels and Paramount Pictures movie studios.
  • CBS Corporation owns CBS television network, Showtime, a number of cable television stations, and a radio news network.

Even the Left admits that a few corporations control the message most Americans see.

What they don’t talk about is that these few corporations are associated with each other in the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, and that they have a tight relationship with government and establishment corporate leadership across the country. The Council on Foreign Relations has only 4,500 members, out of a national population of some 300 million. But they boast some of the most powerful media personalities and media corporate leaders in the country.

Corporate Members include:

NewsCorp, Google, Time-Warner, Verizon, Microsoft, McGraw-Hill (publishing), General Electric (49 percent of NBC), and Thomson-Reuters (publishing/news network). And many of the personalities that Americans see every day on television are CFR members.

For example:

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Rupert Murdoch’s American Media Immunity

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 Michael Wolff (Guardian UK) | RS_News | April 4 2012

OPINION ~ Last week, PBS aired a Frontline documentary, more then six months in the making, about Rupert Murdoch‘s phone-hacking scandal. The big budget film, hosted and reported by Lowell Bergman, one of the pre-eminent US investigative journalists, broke no news nor offered new perspectives about the affair. Rather, the show – the first US documentary to delve into the Murdoch scandals – gave a diligent, if somewhat flat-footed account of events that came to a head last summer, for an audience that, the producers seemed to assume, had missed most of the story.

In the same week, the BBC and the Australian Financial Review, opened up an entirely new chapter in the ever-expanding chronicles of News Corporation‘s scandals: NDS, a News Corp subsidiary company that developed encryption technology for pay TV outlets, had allegedly mounted a long-term effort of piracy and hacking in an effort to undermine its competitors. News Corp’s Australian arm has denied the allegations.

Here’s the thing: Murdoch’s empire may be under siege in one of the most riveting business tales of our time – featuring wounded celebrities, a dynastic family drama, and toadying at the highest levels of government – but American journalism has been mostly absent from the story. At best, it has been a sidelined presence, late to the game, and generally confused about how to get ahead of events happening in another country. This is, arguably, the best thing Murdoch has going for him: in the US, the seat of his company and the main motor of his fortunes, he has been able to hide in plain sight.

So, why the disconnect? In a universe of equal-access global information, how can such parallel worlds comfortably exist? In the world abroad, almost everything is coming apart for Murdoch: his top executives, including his son, face possible imprisonment, his businesses face dismemberment, his reputation is in ruins. In the world at home, he remains the largely untouchable chief executive of one of the most influential companies in the nation. Within the US business and journalistic community, there is no real sense that he is even vulnerable – precisely, or circularly, because it would require a US outcry to bring him down. And the business and journalistic communities, which would have to lead that outcry, haven’t begun to stir.

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