By Richard Moore
I’m guilty of it myself.
That would be of calling the liberally biased national press the “mainstream media.” Or MSM, as we like to refer to it. But it’s inaccurate, and it is not an unimportant inaccuracy.
For one thing, referring to the liberal media as mainstream implies that we conservatives are not mainstream. Somehow, as absurd as it sounds, we constitutionalists who happen to believe in the principles, passion and authority of our nation’s constitution are now viewed as dangerous and irrational extremists, while liberals who seek to subvert our republic’s legal foundation in the name of globalism are seen as normal and reasonable and upstanding.
We only help to defeat our own cause when we cede the mainstream label to them.
More important, the fallacious description not only works against conservatives and libertarians politically but fails to alert the general public to the very real danger lurking within the national media – it’s abandonment of its watchdog duty in democratic society in favor of cheerleading for the government itself.
It excuses rather than exposes; it promotes the words of government officials rather than viewing them with a critical eye. It is the first step toward tyranny.
And so that’s why the media should more precisely be called the state-run media. Its talking heads today more closely resemble the old Soviet journalist and apologist Vladimir Posner than they do Edward R. Murrow.
Our task these days is to unmask and confront that state-run media. By unmask, I do not mean exposing its bias, which is already exposed save to a few hard-core liberals wearing blinders, but instead laying bare the reason for its bias, which leads us to a way to successfully counter it.
The cause is purely this: The state-run media is state run because it is state funded. From the local level to the federal stage, billions of dollars in subsidies flow each year from government to media companies, so much so that, except for the oil industry, the media industry is the most heavily subsidized industry of all.
When you have that much government cash propping you up, you’re apt to toe the government line. The media these days is like a family pet, rolling over on command to get the treat that follows.
Let’s take a look at the various ways the government is training its media lappuppies. First, there is direct government spending on various advertising campaigns. By one accounting, the federal government by itself shelled out $16 billion over the past decade for such undertakings.
In a report last March, the Congressional Research Service reckoned that federal agencies spent AT LEAST $945 million on advertising projects in 2010 alone. At one point, though, they simply threw up their hands and conceded they couldn’t track all the money.
“It is unclear how much the executive branch, let alone the federal government as a whole, spends on communications each year,” the report stated. “However, CRS has estimated that executive branch agencies spent nearly $945 million on contracts for advertising services in FY2010, a figure that does not include all agency public communications expenditures.”
In an April report, the CRS acknowledged the hindrances in tracking the money: “It is difficult to calculate the amount of funds spent by the federal government on advertising each year. The reasons for this include (1) there is no government-wide definition of what constitutes advertising and (2) there is no central authority to which agencies are required to report advertising expenses.”
We all know about the conspicuous examples, such as grants to PBS and NPR. Then there’s the money cascading into the “nonprofit” Ad Council, which lathers advertising agencies – agencies composing critical infrastructure for the national media – with millions of taxpayer dollars.
Indeed, the Ad Council, the government gift that keeps on giving, effectively provided the Obama campaign with millions of dollars in free advertising this past fall as his voice pounded the radio airwaves, embedded in a barrage of “public service” ads.
Federal agencies get in on the act in obvious ways as well. The Census Bureau spent $130 million on an “awareness” project to encourage people to send in their 2010 census forms on time – including a $2.5 million ad during the Super Bowl – while the Department of Agriculture concocted a perverse ad effort encouraging people to sign up for food stamps.
There’s more. Included in the 23 executive actions the president decreed in his ongoing crusade to disarm American citizens is, you guessed it, another ad campaign, dressed up as gun safety. Obama wants to launch “a national safe and responsible gun ownership campaign.”
That’s code talk for an anti-gun message, but it doubly serves to fill the coffers of his media pals.
All of this is merely the tip of the iceberg. The administration has been aggressively marketing Obamacare and the wonders it is working for those of us not smart enough to see it for ourselves. Then, too, as the New York Times reported, the California Health Exchange has spent $900,000 to fashion a public-relations strategy that, among other things, would seek to prod prime-time television shows like “Modern Family” to incorporate the health-care law into their scripts.
So far, we have only been talking about money spent on direct advertising, but there are countless indirect ways the government is channeling money into the bank accounts of media companies. For example, the Washington Post pocketed $537 million from a fund providing taxpayer dollars to Obama-approved companies and unions that have early retiree health insurance plans, ostensibly as an incentive for them to retain them.
CBS also netted $722 million from that slush fund. Slush fund because – why pay companies to have a program they already have and that have given no indication they would end it?
Then there’s General Electric, which paid no taxes in 2010 despite earning $5.1 billion in profit. Rather than publicly target the offshore tax loophole GE used, as he targeted Mitt Romney’s offshore accounts during the presidential campaign, Obama named GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt as one of his top advisors.
GE still owns 49 percent of NBC, by the way, perhaps the most liberal of all the national media outlets; payoffs are delivered in unexpected ways.
The payola occurs on the local level, too. In Wisconsin and in most places, for instance, local governments must select an “official” newspaper and run legal notices in them. It’s a mandated taxpayer subsidy to the “official” newspaper.
Running such notices may have been important a century ago, but they are senseless in the Internet age. Recently I picked up a local Wisconsin paper, only to see “The official Adams County newspaper” emblazoned across its banner. But how critical and objective toward county government can a newspaper be when it brags about being the government’s official organ?
On and on it goes. In the wake of last fall’s election, many rightly frustrated conservatives – fed up with a cloying press overwhelmingly in the tank for Obama – called for a boycott of such national news media as NBC and the New York Times. I understand the frustration, but the method is flawed.
Boycotts are a left-wing tactic. It’s what liberals do when they lose the popular side of an argument. They try to strangle financial backers until they pull their money. Witness the failed crusade to boycott Rush Limbaugh last year.
What’s more, a boycott would not work even if it was the most legitimate tactic on the planet. That’s because for every $1 in revenue the media companies lost from the boycott, the government would replace it with $2 in subsidies. They know how to butter the bread.
The only way to restore a fair and balanced media is in fact to investigate and track the tax dollars going to media giants and then broadcast that it to the world. Such a path is arduous and complicated and littered with land mines, but the conservative and libertarian movements must get it done.
Beyond that, conservatives and libertarians must press legislative allies to make transparency a top priority. They need to legislatively correct the problems the CRS pointed out in its report – the absence of a government-wide definition of advertising and the parallel lack of oversight. Finally, they need to get serious about cutting off the government gravy train to the so-called objective, reasonable media. It must become a conservative and libertarian mantra.
The state-run media will never bite the hand that feeds it. But if the hand has fewer goodies to give it, it might start growling at its government master just a bit, instead of constantly rolling over and begging for its biscuits.
source Richard Moore
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