Remember that book “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus”? Well, business is from Saturn, journalism is from Jupiter As the media monopoly grows, the culture clash between the two is becoming a source of major discomfort. Yes, some business executives know that they must stress the independence of news (Eisner assured ABC News employees that he wouldn’t tamper with their big shows). And some journalists, once middle-class, are now well acquainted with real money (ABC workers saw the value of their company stock increase by 20 percent in one day last week). But adopting the values of the other species can be confusing. Should Gibson look out for his own family? The Disney family? The family of journalistic values he started with? The answer is some combination of all three, of course, but the complications grow with the size of the company.
At first the effects of changing corporate ownership on news are a little hard to figure. Networks are plenty capable of compromising news values on their own, without any help from conglomerates, as anyone who saw ABC News’s recent Michael Jackson-Diane Sawyer tie-in can attest. Besides, it’s rare for a CEO to call down to a reporter and tell him to go easy on one of his subsidiaries. If he does, the lowly reporter may leak it, and the CEO will look stupid. It sometimes takes a while for executives to figure out that the reporters they think of as little bugs to be squashed or spun can be more powerful than they are.
But pressure can still be applied. For instance, Graef Crystal, who was Fortune magazine’s expert on executive pay, resigned after corporate interference with his estimate of the $78 million compensation of Steve Ross, the Time Warner chief. More often, self-censorship is the real problem. In a tight job market, the tendency is to avoid getting yourself or your boss in trouble. So an adjective gets dropped, a story skipped, a punch pulled. NBC’s “Today” show did a segment on corporate boycotts in 1990 and somehow forgot to mention that the biggest boycott at that time was against its owner, General Electric, over its production of nuclear weapons. It’s like that Sherlock Holmes story-the dog that didn’t bark. Those clues are hard to find.
GE and other companies with media holdings say that they try to report on themselves fairly and accurately, and they often succeed. But it’s always self-conscious. Editors at NEWSWEEK will read what’s written about our parent company, The Washington Post, with extra care. The same applies throughout corporate media. When it occurs, self-criticism becomes an ill-fitting badge of honor Time editors congratulate themselves on dissing “Batman Forever” (a Warner film) or reporting critically on the company’s confrontation with Bob Dole over violent entertainment. Asked last week whether his critical judgment of a Disney film might be affected by the takeover, “Good Morning America” critic Joel Siegel quickly recalled that when “Cats” opened on Broadway, he unfavorably compared the choreography of the ABC-financed show to pedestrians crossing the street in traffic. That’s a good line, but how many of his other reviews does Siegel remember word for word 12 years later? Are we approaching a time when nearly every pan will be a memorable act of corporate courage?
Disney managers need to borrow a phrase from investment banking and erect an impermeable “Chinese Wall” around all their news holdings. The test, of course, will be after the next “Lion King” or “Pocahontas” opens. With hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, what will happen to the careers of those local TV and print critics with the energy to stand in the way of synergy? It’s so easy to rationalize compliance: only a cartoon. . . wasn’t so bad. . . why break my pick on this one?
These small concessions to corporate sensibilities are already present every day. For instance, almost none of the news organizations covering the communications bill in Congress acknowledge in their stories that their owners are busy lobbying in favor of the bill. Americans demand transparency from the Japanese when it comes to their keiretsu, but we often don’t even bother to mention our own cross-ownership connections. The ABC network and stations should now routinely indicate their ownership whenever Disney is mentioned. Same for CBS and Westinghouse, and NBC and GE (several stories have aired on nuclear power without stating the tie). Disclosure won’t cure all those queasy feelings among reporters, but it’s an important reminder to viewers that journalists anywhere in corporate America don’t really belong in a warm Magic Kingdom.
