As I mentioned earlier, they don’t want decision-makers and
participants; they want a passive, obedient population of consumers
and political spectators—a community of people who are so
atomized and isolated that they can’t put together their limited
resources and become an independent, powerful force that will chip
away at concentrated power.
Does ownership always determine content?
In some far-reaching sense it does, because if content ever goes
beyond the bounds owners will tolerate, they’ll surely move in to
limit it. But there’s a fair amount of flexibility.
Investors don’t go down to the television studio and make sure
that the local talk-show host or reporter is doing what they want.
There are other, subtler, more complex mechanisms that make it
fairly certain that the people on the air will do what the owners and
investors want. There’s a whole, long, filtering process that makes
sure that people only rise through the system to become managers,
editors, etc., if they’ve internalized the values of the owners.
At that point, they can describe themselves as quite free. So
you’ll occasionally find some flaming independent-liberal type like
Tom Wicker who writes, Look, nobody tells me what to say. I say
whatever I want. It’s an absolutely free system.
And, for him, that’s true. After he’d demonstrated to the
satisfaction of his bosses that he’d internalized their values, he was
entirely free to write whatever he wanted.
Both PBS and NPR [National Public Radio] frequently come under
attack for being left-wing.
That’s an interesting sort of critique. In fact, PBS and NPR are
elite institutions, reflecting by and large the points of view and
interests of wealthy professionals who are very close to business
circles, including corporate executives. But they happen to be
liberal by certain criteria.
That is, if you took a poll among corporate executives on matters
like, say, abortion rights, I presume their responses would be what’s
called liberal. I suspect the same would be true on lots of social
issues, like civil rights and freedom of speech. They tend not to be
fundamentalist, born-again Christians, for example, and they might