Censored News

by Bruce Schimmel

It’s been called The News That Didn’t Make the News. For the last 26 years, Project Censored has been selecting the news stories you haven’t heard, or haven’t heard enough about. This year’s crop of half-told tales features several parables about privatization, as publicly held assets are turned over to benefit large corporations.

Topping Project Censored's list is the privatization of the airwaves, a story that has been emerging since 1995, when the FCC started selling this public resource to the highest bidders. It used to be that the airwaves belonged to the public, and were licensed to be used (in that increasingly quaint turn of phrase) "for the public good."

Radio and television stations were allowed to ride the waves only if they could demonstrate that they were operating for the good of the public. If so, what they got was considered a temporary license.

That temporary license has become a permanent asset. Station owners hardly need to reserve broadcast time for news and public affairs, or ask the audience how they're doing.

As a result, what passes for news is often not newsworthy, but entertainment designed to keep you watching. In a real way, the product of broadcast news doesn't even appear on your screen or come out of a speaker.

The real product of broadcast news is you, as a consumer; and what is transmitted, ultimately, is a message to consume.

If you want to spread the blame for the dot-com bubble, you might as well include corporate-oriented reporting that stimulated mass speculation.

But you won't hear the story about this or other hysterias from those who helped stoke them. And now that one corporation is permitted to own television, radio and print properties in a single market, we tend to hear the same stories told in the same way. When is the last time, for instance, you heard KYW radio take a whack at KYW-TV, or read the Daily News challenge the Inquirer?

Freedom of the press belongs to those who own the press, and in the case of the airwaves that freedom is monopolized by fewer and fewer companies whose primary interest is not the public good but the public's purse. That is bad for everyone.

Even politicians, running for office, must pay dearly for access to the airwaves. And we all know where that has led.

"Democracies die behind closed doors" is this week's, maybe this year's, best line (see Howard Altman's "Slant," this page). It's a quote from the federal judge's opinion which blasts the idea of permitting secret trials for suspected terrorists.

The privatization of the public airwaves also slams doors shut, keeping challenging ideas hidden from view. And when public space is transferred to private hands, that's about the same as the government promoting censorship.