|
CounterPunch
March 4,
2003
MSNBC Sabotages Donahue
The Wages of Media Monopoly
By RALPH NADER
Monopolist Microsoft and oligopolist General Electric--the
co-owners of MSNBC--took their highest rated show off the air
and sent Phil Donahue away on February 25, 2003. After choosing
Donahue to host his own 8pm daily show only six months ago, the
corporate managers micromanaged, mismanaged and refused to let
Phil Donahue be Phil Donahue.
About the only freedom Donahue had was
the freedom to say what he thinks. Beyond that he was often told
what kinds of subjects to showcase and what kind of guests to
have. And he was often chided for being too tough on some guests--shades
of Fox's Bill O'Reilly, his competition for that hour, and the
spitting, screeching, viper-like Sean Hannity.
In the past few months, the corporate
"suits" even told Donahue that he had to have more
conservative or right-wing guests than liberals on the same hour
show. Still, Donahue persevered. His ratings were slowly increasing,
despite the regular lacerations that the top brass inflicted
on a show that was supposed to be the liberal counterpart of
the right-wing, bellicose Fox fare stitched together by Rupert
Murdoch's media empire.
MSNBC, which was receiving ratings of
about 440,000 viewers for Donahue, was aiming for1,000,000 people.
Were they interested in one million predominately liberal viewers
attracted to the legendary talk show host who, starting in the
Sixties, broke apart on morning television the biases or taboos
against women, minorities, gays and lesbians, downtrodden workers,
consumer and environmental rights? Doubtful. For if they were,
some of their promotional budgets would have gone for reaching
liberal audiences of the kind who read Utne magazine, Mother
Jones, or who watch various PBS outlets and other serious programming.
What emerged was quite different than
that described by Steve Friedman, former producer of NBC's "Today"
and the CBS "Early Show," who told a reporter: "I
think MSNBC felt the way to beat Fox was to do a liberal version
of what Fox was doing, and Phil was a good person to do that.
I don't know if they were really committed to that." They
were not. Instead, the top brass allowed other pulls to shatter
the identity and consistency of the show--which, by the way,
would have always provided for contrary views to those held by
Phil.
First, always hovering in their minds
are the corporate advertisers, who do not exactly like a Dr.
Sid Wolfe exposing the harmful effects of brand name drugs. Right-wing
radio and television talk show hosts dominate the electronic
media because, unlike the rare liberal host, they attack government
regulation, while the rare liberal may go after corporate crimes
and abuse. Guess what? Corporations advertise and governments
do not.
But there was more to the NBC officials'
calculations. A commissioned report for NBC's internal purposes
in December put the concern this way: Donahue was described as
"a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current
marketplace." Continuing, the study said that Donahue is
"a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war...he seems
to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and
skeptical of the administration's motives." Unmentioned
was that there were more pro-war guests on the Donahue show than
those espousing an antiwar viewpoint.
In a pointed but polite manner, Donahue
issued a statement that indicated what was going on behind the
scenes: "We were hoping to break through the noisy drums
of war on cable and become a responsible platform for dissenters
as well as Administration supporters. The New York Times op-ed
page features a variety of views regarding the Bush war on Iraq,including
regular columnists who have been critical of the Administration's
foreign policy team. MSNBC's voice should be no less diverse.
The hiring of Mike Savage, Dick Armey and Joe Scarborough suggest
a strategy to outfox Fox."
Starting last fall, leaks from top NBC
sources badmouthed their own Donahue show, leading to regular
trade press rumors about the demise of the show. This is no way
to maintain morale, much less run a business supposedly endowed
with at least some recognition of the public's right to diverse
information and opinion. Top NBC executives, given their enormous
pay, should start paying attention to simple improvements. For
example, in about half the country, MSNBC is not even listed
in the daily and Sunday TV cable guides, including Washington,
D.C. If your programs are not even listed alongside CNN and Fox
programs, there will be fewer viewers. I notified a top NBC executive
late last fall about this remarkable omission. His response:
"I'm astonished to hear that," and he pledged to rectify
the situation. Nothing has changed to date.
Donahue, in his gracious manner, paid
tribute to the "worker bees" at MSNBC's Secaucus, New
Jersey headquarters. These are the same workers whose state income
tax payments are in effect refunded to profit-glutted Microsoft
and General Electric under a corporate welfare scheme that the
two companies demanded from then Governor Christie Todd Whitman.
Now that would have been a great Donahue show!
Yesterday's
Features
Dr. Richard Lichtman
Psychologists
and War
John Stanton
Life
in a Barrel of Oil
Carol Norris
George Bush's War on Himself: the World is His Battlefield
Wayne Madsen
The
First Shots of the War
Pablo Mukherjee
Orwell's
Bastards: Lies and Shameless Pretence
Larry Mosqueda
A Duty to Obey All Unlawful Orders
Behzad Yaghmaian
Scarf and Make-Up: the Modern Face of Islam
Jason Leopold
Hell-Bent for War: the Six Year Campaign by Right Wing Think
Tanks to Promote Takeover of Iraq
Anthony Gancarski
Bush's Divine Inspiration:
What If Jesus Were a Gunslinger?
Ellen Cantarow
The
Day of the Barricades: New York City Against the People
Sam Bahour & Michael Dahan
Snow Covered Rubble
Website of the Day
Bush
and Blair: the Duet
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- CounterPunch Special:
The Persecution of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis: Smut, the Post Office, Commies
and the FBI;
- Reeling Democrats: Is Pelosi the Answer?
- Gandhi v. Hitler: the Secret Race for the Nobel
Prize;
- Sullying Mario Savio's
Memory;
- Lynching Then and Now;
- Earn While You Learn: Chris Whittle and Child Labor;
The Case of the Pompous
Professor;
- The Class Struggle in
Boston: All that
Effort, But What Did They Get?
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
February 28,
2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Meet
the New Yorker's Chief Hack: Jeffrey Goldberg
Saul Landau
Now
It's Personal
Michael Neumann
A Plea for Hysteria
Karima Bennoume
The UN: Tool for Peace or War?
The Black
Commentator
The Rev. Sharpton and the Soul of the Democrats
Jennifer Loewenstein
Don't Turn Off the War
Richard Levins
Cuba's Biological Weapons: Why the World Needs More of Them
M. Shahid Alam
Is This a Clash of Civilizations?
Clay Conrad
Juries
and Judges: What's Relevant?
Ben Tripp
Speaking in Tongues: a Guide to Gibberish in the Age of Bush
Eliot Katz
To Declare Preemptive War is to Declare a Bankrupt Imagination
Kurt Nimmo
Paying Through the Nose to Kill Iraqi Kids
Matt Vidal
George W. Bonaparte
Mark Zepezauer
Why the Right Hates America
Mickey Z.
The Anti-War Talk I Never Gave
Jerry Kroth
Jung and the Space Shuttle Revisited
Shyam Oberoi
Chronicle of a War Foretold
Ron Jacobs
What If the Firebombing of Baghdad Were a Nightclub Fire?
Poets' Basement
Eliot Katz and Jim Cohn
Website of
the Weekend
Defense
Tech
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|