I admire a gallant crusade as much as the next guy, but StopBigMedia.com has the ring of an army raised to fight the last war. Why should anyone in Chicago take up arms against big media when big media’s already falling apart on its own?
StopBigMedia.com is run by Free Press, a Washington-based “national, nonpartisan organization working to reform the media.” Rooting around its Web sites, StopBigMedia.com and freepress.net, I came across a video link to a speech Bill Moyers gave at the National Conference for Media Reform, presented by Free Press in June in Minneapolis. It was, as Free Press executive director Josh Silver puts it, “vintage Moyers.” And Moyers couldn’t resist going off on Zell.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“I believe more fervently than ever that as journalism goes, so goes democracy,” said Moyers. “Yet as mergers and buyouts change both old and new media, bringing a frenzied focus on cost cutting while fattening the pockets of both the new owners and their investors, we are seeing journalism degraded through the layoffs and buyouts of legions of reporters and editors…. The new owner of the Tribune Company, real estate mogul Sam Zell, recently toured his new property, the Los Angeles Times newsroom, telling his new employees the challenge is, ‘How do we get somebody 126 years old to get it up?’ Well, said Zell, ‘I’m your Viagra.’”
What is it about Zell? I asked Josh Silver. “He insults journalists and journalism at virtually every whistle stop on his tour,” Silver replied, referring to Zell’s visits to Tribune Company properties. “He says it’s not about democracy—it’s about profits. The American public and policy makers have to decide whether journalism is produced purely for the reaping of profit or if it’s a central component to a functioning participatory democracy.
Those are Silver’s concerns, and though I might put them a little less grandiosely, I share them. The Free Press Web sites are a handy gateway to media analysis, some of it more soberly phrased. On freepress.net I came upon a link to a transcript of a July 29 panel discussion on Democracy Now! on the sorry state of the newspaper industry. This time Zell got a sliver of sympathy. Bernard Lunzer, president of the Newspaper Guild, said there’s “a lot of fear, almost a sense of panic,” at American papers as stocks tumble and staffs are slashed. Part of the problem is that the companies were “addicted” to huge profit margins, Lunzer said, but he allowed that in Zell’s case and some others “they paid too much, they’re overleveraged, there’s too much debt.”
But how alarmed should we be by this? Why shouldn’t advertisers exploit key words? They’ve always directed their ad dollars at the programs and publications that best deliver the specific audiences they covet. What degree of specificity turns that into a sin?
