Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Journalists and media outlets surrender independence to powerful interest groups.

     Extra is the magazine published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (Fair), a national media monitoring organization. I have subscribed to Extra for many years now, and it is one of my favorite sources of news (after Insurgent49, of course). It is a great way to learn about the foibles and follies afflicting all forms of reporting, including newspapers, magazines, radio and television. It is available by subscription, on the newsstands, and in many libraries.

     If you are not familiar with Extra, the April 2006 issue is a wonderful introduction to what the magazine has to offer. It has many excellent articles, and features their annual report, entitled “Fear & Favor 2005", which provides numerous examples of the many ways that powerful special interests shape, suppress and supplement media reporting in ways which serve their private agendas.

     Here is your trivia question for the week. Which Alaska newspaper had the dubious distinction of being the very first news outlet mentioned by name in the 2005 report? I’ll have the answer for you later in this column.

     According to the FAIR report, there are at least three major categories of interest groups who regularly succeed in unfairly shaping the content of the media. First, there are the advertisers. There are a fairly large number of major advertisers who have a policy of pulling their advertisements from publications that offend them. Some of these advertisers even demand advance copies of articles that relate to their interests.

     Unfortunately, many media outlets can’t resist these pressures. USA Today, Business Week, Fortune and even the New York Times were unwilling to tell a reporter from Ad Age how they respond to these types of advertiser demands. I don’t think they would be refusing to talk if they were proud of their practices regarding these matters.

     Another source of undue influence comes from the large corporations that own the media. Of course, as owners, they have the right to write the editorials and set journalistic standards for the media they own. But it is a gross violation of journalistic ethics (and the public interest) for them to suppress straight news stories simply because they may reveal information the owner finds inconvenient, or to demand that stories be slanted to favor the interests of the owner. Unfortunately, these types of distortions are all too common.

     A third source of interference comes from the government. The Bush administration has spent millions of dollars to bribe journalists and columnists for favorable press. Some state governors have engaged in the same type of tactics. The Bush administration has also succeeded in suppressing news about illegal wiretaps, and about the locations of “black box” sites for interrogating terror suspects. Both of these stories were withheld by media outlets for a year, based upon the Bush administration’s claims that publishing them would harm national security.

     The point of the FAIR report is not that all journalists are bad, but rather that we need to be informed and discriminating consumers of news. There are many special interests that shape media articles in unseen ways. You can’t accept what the corporate media tell you at face value. That is one of the reasons that papers like Insurgent49 can fill in the gaps that other media won’t cover.

     OK, OK, for you wonks who are interested in such things, here is the answer to the trivia question. It was the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, which last year announced to its staff that it was going to hire an “advertorial editor”, who would be paid half by the news room and half by the advertising department. Many newspapers at least attempt to keep a strict separation between the advertising department and the news department, but it seems that the News-Miner thinks it is a good idea to blend the two.

     There couldn’t be any undue advertising influence going on there, could there?

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