Fairness in Media?

Senator Jesse Helms' personal crusade against the First Amendment continues unabated. The same man who would have the state serve the fundamentalist Christian church believes the press should serve the right-wing American state. Long skilled in circumventing the Constitution, Helms, in this case, has simply walked through one of its gaping loopholes: While the First Amendment ensures that Congress will make no laws restricting freedom of the press, it says nothing about members of Congress simply buying the press to further their own ends.

And that is exactly what Helms, with his Fairness in Media group, is hoping to accomplish through his current bid to take over CBS. "Fairness," in this case, is little more than thinly veiled arch-conservatism.

In the letter he sent to one million Americans, Helms said, "FIM is launching a nationwide campaign, very much like a presidential campaign, to end the liberal bias at CBS by urging conservatives to purchase enough CBS stock ... if necessary to control the network ... FIM is counting on you to become Dan Rather's boss—by switching a portion of your investments to CBS stock."

Helms' ensuing vitriolic statements against the major media organizations and the people who run them provide a frightening vision of his philosophy of American journalism. The nation's "elite media are profoundly out of step with the ideals and goals of the American people," Helms said. America's leading newspapers and network television news shows are, according to Helms, "produced by men and women, who, if they do not hate American virtues, they certainly have a smug contempt for American ideals and principles."

Then, in a truly sensational statement, Helms said, "The real threat to freedom, the real threat to freedom of speech and the real threat to our constitutional system is on our TV screens every evening and on the front pages of our newspapers every day."

CBS, which has been Helms' most consistent rhetorical target and his only takeover goal, has responded in kind, with its own legal action and with the expected measure of self-righteous indignation. The network's official response said:

"CBS News reports the news as accurately and fairly as it can independent of any political point of view. Its sole purpose is journalism. Its goal is total objectivity. To seek control of a corporation for the sole purpose of subjecting its news to political influence contradicts the traditions of a free and independent press. CBS intends to take all appropriate steps to maintain the independence and integrity of its news organization."

However, while the media's defensive statements are understandable, they, like Helms, are fundamentally wrong.

Helms is wrong in believing he and his constituency should be able to buy and control CBS for their own ends; CBS and other media are mistaken in believing they are independent of the corporate and, therefore, political interests that do, in fact, control them. Helms is wrong in believing that a liberal bias distorts the news; the media err in refusing to see and admit their strong, status-quo bias.

HELMS' ATTEMPT to take over and control CBS News raises—and indirectly answers—the question of who controls America's information flow. Mainstream media organizations are owned and controlled by the same corporate interests whose profit margins depend, in part, on the success of the foreign, military, and economic policies designed to ensure the growth of American business. The vested interests of these media executives influence their news judgment and coverage.

Indeed, the very fact of big business control of the major media renders baseless Helms' charges of liberal media bias. It is in the media's corporate interest to support the political and economic status quo. These interests are so strong that more than two-thirds of the country's daily newspapers endorsed Ronald Reagan for president.

The corporate interests of media executives, combined with the thoroughly mainstream American socialization of most reporters and editors, results in a news product that most often neither serves, challenges, nor enlightens its readers and viewers. In taking its cue on what is news and what is not from the political and economic establishment, and by taking care to "objectively" report what the "other side" says, the media rarely report the whole story and often report little more than two kinds of disinformation.

Contrary to Helms' belief that journalists are essentially anti-American, their very vows of neutrality lead them to unconsciously follow the sometimes hidden agenda of those who call the shots and set the pace in our society. Their most critical mistake is in believing that their refusal to take sides frees them of the responsibility of making choices. The news, like life, is not value neutral, and their refusal to choose is in itself a choice.

The effects of corporate media ownership and journalists' search for a mythical neutrality are readily apparent in the nature and content of the news that is produced. Take, for example, reporting on elections in El Salvador and Nicaragua. On the 1982 elections in El Salvador— which received great praise from the Reagan administration even though they have been documented as fraudulent—the three major news networks ran a total of 22 approximately five-minute-long, positive stories during a seven-day period. To the 1984 Nicaraguan elections—which the Reagan administration declared a farce—the same networks devoted a total of 18 minutes and 40 seconds of evening news coverage over a two-month period.

Likewise, we see numerous news stories on press censorship in Nicaragua and little or nothing about the Sandinistas' land reform and health care programs; stories about the Sandinistas' defense build-up and near silence on the atrocities committed by the contras; hours devoted to obscene, multi-billion-dollar weapons systems and scarce minutes about the related increases in poverty, hunger, unemployment, homelessness, suicide, and infant mortality; 60-point headlines broadcasting the sins of those zealots who bomb abortion clinics and scarcely a word about peaceful, constructive alternatives to abortion—much less the violence of abortion itself.

The basic fault of the mainstream American media is not, as Jesse Helms would have us believe, that they are anti-American, but that they and their products are all too American. Forced by the system of mainstream journalism to leave their politics, their choices, their knowledge of right and wrong—their very hearts—at the door where they pick up their press passes, too many journalists have forgotten about truth. Too often they see everything in blurs of "on the other hand."

Mainstream media and the journalists who work for them must stop striving for an unattainable impartiality. They should decide and declare to whom and what they will be partial. We can only hope that they will choose to be partial not to money and power, objectivity and the status quo, but that they will choose to be partial to truth.

Vicki Kemper was news editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.