Letters to the Editor
To Report Accurately, One Must Pay Attention
Regarding Steven Zeitchik's article ("It Reports! It Decides!," Taste Page, July 16) on the July 13 panel sponsored by the Center for American Progress and World Policy Institute on media concentration, I wish he had paid a bit more attention. I did not make the statement Mr. Zeitchik attributes to me about trying to get a conservative on the panel. The comment was made by someone else, as I had little to do with the panel's composition.
As for Nick Lemann being the only member of the panel to distinguish between media concentration and the rise of Fox being one and the same, I believe I spoke to this very point when I pointed out that in the case of Sinclair Broadcasting attempting to censor Ted Koppel's "Nightline" on the occasion of its reminding Americans of the cost in lives of the Iraq war, by reading the names of fallen soldiers, it was the "little guy" who was performing in a Fox-like fashion, while big, bad ABC/Disney was seeking to uphold the standards of decent journalism.
Eric Alterman
New York
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The Nation - June 28, 2004 [letter to the editor]
RETHINK MEDIA CONCENTRATION
New York City
Eric Alterman, in his May 24 "Stop the Presses" column, writes that the refusal of the Sinclair Broadcast Group to air Nightline's listing of the Iraq war dead "demonstrated the dangers to democratic discourse of allowing too much media power to be concentrated in too few hands." But Sinclair isn't really a media giant; it owns sixty-two TV stations out of nearly 2,000 in the United States. ABC, the Disney-owned producer of Nightline, certainly is one of the biggies. And in this case, the biggie was closer to doing the right thing than the smaller outfit.
The media-concentration thesis is in need of a serious rethink. The country is full of regional chains that produce truly awful local newspapers; the major national dailies are far better. Instead of concentration, we should be talking about the kind of media produced by shareholder-owned companies operating in competitive markets under the discipline of maximizing profits. Concentration is often the natural byproduct of competition, as losers disappear or are taken over by winners. To focus on concentration alone is, as economists say, to misspecify the problem.
DOUG HENWOOD Left Business Observer