Big Media Interlocks with Corporate America
By Peter Phillips
Mainstream media is the term often used to describe the collective
group of big TV, radio and newspapers in the United States.
Mainstream implies that the news being produced is for the benefit
and enlightenment of the mainstream population-the majority of people
living in the US. Mainstream media include a number of communication
mediums that carry almost all the news and information on world
affairs that most Americans receive. The word media is plural,
implying a diversity of news sources.
However, mainstream media no longer produce news for the mainstream
population-nor should we consider the media as plural. Instead it is
more accurate to speak of big media in the US today as the corporate
media and to use the term in the singular tense-as it refers to the
singular monolithic top-down power structure of self-interested news
giants.
A research team at Sonoma State University has recently finished
conducting a network analysis of the boards of directors of the ten
big media organizations in the US. The team determined that only 118
people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten
big media giants. This is a small enough group to fit in a moderate
size university classroom. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the
corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. In
fact, eight out of ten big media giants share common memberships on
boards of directors with each other. NBC and the Washington Post both
have board members who sit on Coca Cola and J. P. Morgan, while the
Tribune Company, The New York Times and Gannett all have members who
share a seat on Pepsi. It is kind of like one big happy family of
interlocks and shared interests. The following are but a few of the
corporate board interlocks for the big ten media giants in the US:
New York Times: Caryle Group, Eli Lilly, Ford, Johnson and Johnson, Hallmark,
Lehman Brothers, Staples, Pepsi
Washington Post: Lockheed Martin, Coca-Cola, Dun & Bradstreet, Gillette,
G.E. Investments, J.P. Morgan, Moody's
Knight-Ridder: Adobe Systems, Echelon, H&R Block, Kimberly-Clark,
Starwood Hotels
The Tribune (Chicago & LA Times): 3M, Allstate, Caterpillar, Conoco
Phillips, Kraft,
McDonalds, Pepsi, Quaker Oats, Shering Plough, Wells Fargo
News Corp (Fox): British Airways, Rothschild Investments
GE (NBC): Anheuser-Busch, Avon, Bechtel, Chevron/Texaco, Coca-Cola, Dell, GM,
Home Depot, Kellogg, J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, Motorola, Procter & Gamble,
Disney (ABC): Boeing, Northwest Airlines, Clorox, Estee Lauder,
FedEx, Gillette,
Halliburton, Kmart, McKesson, Staples, Yahoo,
Viacom (CBS): American Express, Consolidated Edison, Oracle, Lafarge
North America
Gannett: AP, Lockheed-Martin, Continental Airlines, Goldman Sachs,
Prudential, Target,
Pepsi,
AOL-Time Warner (CNN): Citigroup, Estee Lauder, Colgate-Palmolive, Hilton
Can we trust the news editors at the Washington Post to be
fair and objective regarding news stories about Lockheed-Martin
defense contract over-runs? Or can we assuredly believe that ABC will
conduct critical investigative reporting on Halliburton's sole-source
contracts in Iraq? If we believe the corporate media give us the full
un-censored truth about key issues inside the special interests of
American capitalism, then we might feel that they are meeting the
democratic needs of mainstream America. However if we believe - as
increasingly more Americans do- that corporate media serves its own
self-interests instead of those of the people, than we can no longer
call it mainstream or refer to it as plural. Instead we need to say
that corporate media is corporate America, and that we the mainstream
people need to be looking at alternative independent sources for our
news and information.
Peter Phillips is a professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University
and director of Project Censored a media research organization.
www.projectcensored.org
Sonoma State University students Bridget Thornton and Brit Walters
conducted the research on the media interlocks.
--
Peter Phillips Ph.D.
Sociology Department/Project Censored
Sonoma State University
1801 East Cotati Ave.
Rohnert Park, CA 94928
707-664-2588
http://www.projectcensored.org/
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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