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Banned in the Media A Reference Guide to Censorship in the Press, Motion Pictures, Broadcasting, and the Internet PDF

267 Pages·1998·40.904 MB·English
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Banned in t h e Media A Reference Guide t o Censorship in t h e Press, Motion Pictures, Broadcasting, and t h e Internet H e r b e r t N . Foerstel Greenwood Press Westport, Connecticut· London Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Foerstel, Herbert N. Banned in the media : a reference guide to censorship in the press, motion pictures, broadcasting, and the internet / Herbert N. Foerstel. p. em. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-313-30245-6 (alk. paper) 1. Mass media-Censorship-United States. I. Title. P96.C42U654 1998 363.3'1'0973-DC21 97-43931 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 1998 by Herbert N. Foerstel All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-43931 ISBN: 0-313-30245-6 First published in 1998 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyright Acknowledgments The author and the publisher gratefully acknowledge permission for use of the following material: Excerpts from interviews conducted by Herbert N. Foerstel with Jerry Berman, Walter Cronkite, Paul Jarrico, Howard Morland, Daniel Schorr and Peter Y. Suss man. Used by permission of interviewees. Contents •• I ntroduction Vll Chapter 1: A Brief History of Media Censorship 1 Newspapers 1 Magazines 11 17 Motion Pictures Radio 26 Television 32 Internet 42 57 Chapter 2: Prominent Examples of Media Censorship 57 The Trial of John Peter Zenger, 1735 H. L. Mencken and the Hatrack Case, 1926 63 74 John Henry Faulk and the Radio Blacklist, 1955 82 The Progressive Tells the H-Bomb Secret, 1979 Warning: Political Propaganda May Be Dangerous to 87 Your Health, 1983 96 The Tobacco Wars, 1994 A Frightened University Censors Cybersex, 1994 106 vi • Contents Chapter 3: A Chronological History of Media Censorship Cases 119 Chapter 4: Voices from the Media 159 Paul Jarrico: The Hollywood Inquisition 159 Howard Morland: Telling the H-Bomb Secret 166 Peter Sussman: Committing Journalism 175 Daniel Schorr: Challenging Broadcasting's Corporate Masters 183 Walter Cronkite: Journalistic Courage, Then and Now 189 Jerry Berman: Forging the Digital Bill of Rights 194 Appendix A: The Student Press after Hazelwood: 203 Censorship and Response in the 1990s 205 A Survey of Student Press Censorship Conclusion: State Alternatives to Hazelwood Restraints 217 Appendix B: A Selective List of Media Advocacy and 229 Censorship Organizations Selected Bibliography 237 Index 241 Introduction The 1996 Oxford Modern English Dictionary defines the "media" as "the main means of mass communication (esp. newspapers and broad casting)." The 1995 Cambridge Paperback Encyclopedia (David Crys tal, ed., 2d ed., 1995) says "media" is "a collective term for television, radio, cinema, and the press." This book will use these standard def initions, with one modification: the inclusion of the Internet, the new est and most controversial form of mass communication. There is little doubt that the media have overwhelmed books as the preferred source of information and entertainment worldwide, and the United States is both the primary producer and the primary consumer of the media product. A recent study conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and the New York communications investment house, Veronis Suhler, produced some startling figures. The media business has be come one of the twelve largest industries in the United States. Profits are high; operating margins range from 5.4 percent for the emerging interactive digital media to more than 16 percent for broadcasters. Several of the big newspapers do even better. The expectation is that the growth rate of newspaper revenues will double between 1995 and the year 2000, and the other media will do almost as well. I More interesting is the data indicating the stranglehold that the me dia have on the American public. The ordinary American spends 3,400 hours a year consuming the media output. That represents al most 40 percent of our lives, more time than we spend sleeping and far more time than we spend working. Radio and television represent viii • Introduction 80 percent of our media consumption. Our reading occupies about an hour a day, half of it for newspapers. By the year 2000, according to the study, we will be reading even less, watching television even more, and spending more time on the Internet. 2 Little wonder, then, that we hear so much about the power of the media and its influence on everything from morality to politics. The current problem is not the growing media power, but the narrowing corporate cabal that wields it. In 1983 Ben Bagdikian, then journalism dean at the University of California, Berkeley, published The Media Monopoly, which revealed that at least half of all media business was controlled by just fifty corporations. By 1987, when his second edition appeared, he reported that just twenty-nine corporations exercised that power, and by the time of his fourth edition in 1992, that number had shrunk to twenty. Bagdikian noted a similar evolution in newspapers and magazines. Of the 1,700 daily newspapers in this country, 98 per cent were local monopolies and most of their combined circulation was controlled by fewer than fifteen corporations. Among magazines, Time, Inc., alone was responsible for 40 percent of industry revenues. 3 Bagdikian wrote, [AJ shrinking number of large media corporations now regard mo nopoly, oligopoly, and historic levels of profit as not only normal, but as their earned right. In the process, the usual democratic ex pectations for the media-diversity of ownership and ideas-have disappeared as the goal of official policy, and worse, as a daily ex perience of a generation of American viewers and readers.... It's no way to maintain a lively marketplace of ideas, which is to say it is no way to maintain a democracy.4 Bagdikian's trailblazing research and widely praised 1987 edition of The Media Monopoly were virtually ignored by the media. His explana tion of why the major media had failed to discuss the disadvantages of media consolidation was simple: editors were not interested in these problems because they were all in the newspaper consolidation busi ness themselves. Indeed, the media's failure to address the most significant problem in its industry caused that very issue to be declared the' 'most censored news story of 1987" by the prestigious Project Censored. Every year since 1977, Project Censored, based at Sonoma State University, has Introduction • ix published its list of the news issues or "stories" that have been most heavily suppressed during the previous year. The judges who selected the media monopoly story as the "most censored" during 1987 in cluded John Kenneth Galbraith, Bill Moyers, and Judith Krug. Com munications professor CarlJensen, originator of Project Censored, said the judges selected the media monopoly story because it was the root cause for underreporting generally. "We have fewer sources, fewer out lets and more control by fewer people," said Jensen. 5 The problem of media monopolies has worsened in recent years, but it continues to be ignored by the media. Project Censored's latest edition, Censored 1997: The News That Didn't Make the News, featured an article, "Free the Media," that literally mapped out the four giant corporations that control the major television news divisions: the Na tional Broadcasting Company (NBC), the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the Cable News Network (CNN). Author Mark Miller notes that two of the four holding corporations are defense contractors (both involved in nuclear production), and the other two purvey entertainment. Miller concludes that we are thus the subjects of a "national entertainment state," in which the news and much of our amusement are provided by the two most powerful industries in the United States. Miller presents an elaborate chart that maps the tentacles of General Electric, Time Warner, Disney/Cap Cities and Westinghouse, the four media giants. He says a glance at each chart reveals why, say, Tom Brokaw might have difficulty covering stories critical of nuclear power, or ABC News will no longer be likely to do an expose of Disney's policies, or, indeed, why none of the media is willing to touch the biggest story of them all-the media monopoly itself. Miller says such maps "suggest the true causes of those enormous ills that now dismay so many Americans: the universal sleaze and 'dumbing down,' the flood tide of corporate propaganda, the terminal inanity of U.S. politics." He warns that "the same gigantic players that control the elder media are planning shortly to absorb the Internet, which could be transformed from a thriving common wilderness into an immeasurable de facto cyberpark for corporate interests, with all the dissident voices exiled to sites known only to the activists." Only a new, broad-based antitrust movement can save the media, according to Miller. 6 The media have always been the captive of religion and politics, scorned and manipulated by both in ways beyond anything suffered by x • Introduction book publishers. A recent example of the former is the boycott launched by Baptists against the Walt Disney Company. On June 18, 1997, the Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas, Texas overwhelm ingly approved a resolution urging the denomination's 15.7 million members to boycott all presentations and products bearing the Disney name and everything produced by the vast Disney conglomerate that includes Miramax Films, ABC television, ESPN, E! and Disney cable channels and Hyperion Books. The primary objection expressed by the Baptists was Disney's support for homosexuals, as represented by ABC's sitcom "Ellen," whose star is an admitted lesbian and Disney's willing ness to grant health benefits to the partners of homosexual employees. The Baptists admit that the effectiveness of the boycott may not be immediately evident, but Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission, said, "The Crusades were not a high point in public relations for the church, but they give people a feeling of accomplishment, and this boycott may do the same for many Ameri cans. "7 Banned in the U.S.A. (1994) examined censorship in book publishing, but only in the context of schools and libraries. This book may be regarded as a sequel to Banned in the U.S.A., but there are significant differences. Banned in the Media examines censorship in six formats newspapers, magazines, radio, television, motion pictures and the In ternet-in a wide variety of contexts. Whereas individual books can be plucked from school classrooms or library shelves by nervous school or library officials, much of the media product is ephemeral, and its censorship is wielded with a broader brush. An important distinction between my methodologies for analyzing books and the media is the manner in which incidents of censorship are tallied and compared. The number of times a particular book title is banned from school curricula or removed from library shelves can be tallied and a list of the most banned books can be assembled, but much of the media does not admit to such particularization. The wide and disparate variety of media formats make it impossible to analyze statistically and rank incidents across the entire media. Frequently, it is even difficult to isolate and identity the origin of media censorship. Serial publications, particularly magazines, are uniquely vulnerable to newsstand or convenience store boycotts. They also suffer censor ship of individual articles or issues. Motion pictures, like books, have been banned in ways that allow statistical analysis, but the monolithic

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