Margaret Sullivan on the ‘chicken’ media
In her newsletter, media expert Sullivan is alerting us to a report titled “A More Perfect Media: Saving America’s fourth estate from billionaires, broligarchy and Trump” that’s being published by the Free Press, a 20-year-old media-advocacy nonprofit.
The report is accompanied by the Free Press’ online Media Capitulation Index, a performance rating of America’s 35 biggest media conglomerates.
The ratings range from a star, signaling independence, to five chickens, signaling propaganda.
Bloomberg News gets a star. The New York Times gets one chicken, meaning “vulnerable.” Disney, which owns ABC News, gets three chickens, which indicates “capitulating.” Fox Corp., which includes Fox News, gets four chickens, meaning “obeying.”
The report’s author, Tim Karr, a former international reporter for news organizations including The Associated Press and Time, tells Sullivan why the Times ranks a chicken.
“There is a tendency to ‘both-sides’ reporting about the Trump administration,” Karr says, giving “equal weight to the forces of democracy and the forces of authoritarianism.” One sees this particularly in headlines and, he says, in feature reporting that glorifies and normalizes anti-democratic public officials with glowing attention, for example, to their fashion or lifestyle choices. That, he says, amounts to “soft-pedaling fascism.”
Karr says the tendency toward media capitulation has been worsening since the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which removed many of the restrictions on media ownership. The result, he says, has been a “massive realignment.” Huge, diverse corporations own news companies, and independent journalism too often takes a back seat to corporate profits, mergers and other forms of consolidation. Meanwhile, public media have been defunded, local journalism lacks local ownership, and partisan propaganda has found an influential home on radio and cable news.
Karr’s report concludes: “The only way to build a more perfect media is through a people-powered movement in support of an independent news-and-information sector — and the policies and practices needed to bring it into being.”