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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.
