The Untold Story

THE NEW SUBSCRIPTION CARDS FALLING OUT OF Mother Jones magazine ask readers to check one of two boxes: "Yes (I'll gladly subscribe to a news source not owned by some huge corporation)." Or "No (I trust General Electric, AOL Time-Warner and Disney to tell me everything I need to know)." Missing is a third box: "Maybe (But first I want to know whether your seemingly badass reporters are beholden to Big Media themselves)."

Even the hardest-working journalists who regularly decipher the mojo of Big Media know they're losing the battle of influence by the moguls. Who among us can say, thanks to partnership deals cooked up by agents or bosses like book deals and TV appearances, that they haven't drunk the Kool-Aid? Some of the conflicts of interest are basic, like the Entertainment Weekly film reviewer about to pass judgment on a Warner Bros. movie. Others are complex, like Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter enjoying a Hollywood deal with Barry Diller while at the same publishing a fawning (and, we now know, faulty) profile of Diller's then-new Vivendi boss, Jean-Marie Messier. And a few are impenetrable, like the Tribune Company's Los Angeles Times taking the unusual step of running a recent editorial that dissed Disney chairman and CEO Michael Eisner, which on the surface looked like the opening salvo in a rivalry between two media giants.

Case in point: The other day, one of those closed-door Big Media love fests -- like the kind regularly put on throughout the 1990s before media stocks plummeted and wiped out the kids' college funds -- was held in a lavish ballroom in a Wall Street hotel, where invited VIPs hung on the words of Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.), Barry Diller (Vivendi Universal) and Steve Case (AOL Time-Warner). Most of the moderators were star journalists on Big Media's payrolls: Kurt Andersen (consultant to Diller), Charlie Rose (correspondent for CBS/Viacom's 60 Minutes), Forrest Sawyer (anchor on MSNBC) and others who know today's interviewee is potentially tomorrow's boss and so therefore decided quite openly to lick the hand that feeds them. The result is that everything said at the conference was kept off the record.

With friends this accommodating, who needs real journalists?

The fact is that truly independent coverage of Big Media is disappearing right before our eyes. As for what's left, we can no longer trust our sight. Given the recent layoffs at Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week and Forbes, the pool of independent business reporters grows smaller by the day. Then there's all that cross-fertilization, whereby print reporters pocket appearance fees or even fat contracts from, say, CNBC. (Interesting that it wasn't those news outlets but Jack Welch's second wife who informed parent company GE's shareholders about his company-paid retirement perks.) Other journalists have recently quit the Big Media beat to join its PR machine. Some have tired of trying to pry info out of the same all-powerful handful of moguls. (The latest is Los Angeles Times' Corie Brown, who's giving up The Industry to cover the restaurant business.)

In this Big Media age of agendas upon agendas upon agendas, being co-opted is the rule rather than the exception. Michael Wolff, the award-winning New York magazine media columnist, signed a book contract with a News Corp.-owned publisher to opine about media moguls. Since then, he's written too fondly about Rupert Murdoch. (As Murdoch biographer Neil Chenoweth newly observes, "It's . . . the sort of charitable prescience that only a $750,000 book advance from Murdoch's HarperCollins properly illuminates.") Tina Brown now works for News. Corp.-owned The Times of London as a media columnist to tattle on moguls other than Murdoch. Since then, there hasn't been a peep out of her husband, Harry Evans, who has said and written reams over the years about the dark side of Murdoch's empire. (Asked once to give his opinion of Rupert, Evans drew the connection between Paradise Lost and Lucifer.)

We're shocked, shocked, to see Big Media conglomerates fail to accurately or extensively cover themselves when journalism to them clearly has no value unless it's profitable or propagandistic. Take the impending CNN/ABC news merger. Everybody is fixated on the prospect of a shotgun wedding between Barbara Walters and Larry King. But still to be resolved, before profit-starved parent companies Walt Disney Co. and AOL Time-Warner can begin saving that $200 million in operating expenses, is just who will control editorial? Hopefully, neither of them, considering their recent histories of validating our worst fears about conglomerate ownership of major news outlets.

After buying ABC in 1995, Eisner declared on the record, "I would prefer ABC not cover Disney." Interesting that, just a few days after this Eisner interview was broadcast on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, ABC news boss David Westin killed the network's story which examined whether Disney's policy of not running criminal background checks on all new hires allowed for the employment of convicted pedophiles at its theme parks and resorts. ("Are you crazy?" Westin reportedly said when the story's instigator, Brian Ross, kept insisting the fruit of his four-month investigation should air, according to the behind-the-scenes account in Brill's Content.) Westin "concluded that the script did not meet ABC News editorial standards." It's not just no ABC coverage of Disney, but no criticism, either. When Barbara Walters used her ABC show The View to express dismay at Disney's attempt to replace Ted Koppel with David Letterman, she received a verbal drubbing from Disney president Bob Iger in Vanity Fair.