AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now! Free Speech Radio. I’m Amy Goodman.

Well, we’ve just seen how corporations shape the production of history. Now we’re going to look at how corporations shape the raw material of history. The daily news coverage we consume not only shapes our perception of the present, but will become the grist for museum curators, historical filmmakers, textbook writers in future constructions of the past.

But now more than ever, the news media is increasingly controlled by a few multinational companies. When Ben Bagdikian wrote his groundbreaking book, The Media Monopoly, in the early ’80s, 50 corporations controlled half or more of the media business. Now that figure has shrunk to six.

Today we’re going to look at how the influence — we’re going to look at the influence of one man. Rupert Murdoch, the chair of the News Corporation, employs over 50,000 people, pulled in revenues of $13.5 billion in 1999. Murdoch owns Fox News, seven other U.S. news networks. In Britain, he owns Sky, with 150 channels and services; also owns Star TV satellite service, which reaches 300 million people across Asia; and Phoenix Satellite TV and four other channels, which serve much of China. The News Corporation also broadcasts in India, Japan, Indonesia, New Zealand, Latin America and Europe. As far as print journalism, Murdoch owns the New York Post in the U.S., The Times and The Sun in Britain. In Australia, he owns over a hundred titles, including The Daily Telegraph and 67 suburban papers.

Well, last week, Murdoch’s fortunes took another positive turn when Michael Smith, the chair of Hughes Electronics, announced suddenly he’s resigning. Hughes Electronics owns DirecTV, the satellite television provider that Murdoch has been trying to buy for nearly a year. Smith has blocked Murdoch at every turn.

Bob McChesney joins us now with Danny Schechter of MediaChannel.org. Bob McChesney is co-editor of Monthly Review magazine and author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy.

What will it mean if Rupert Murdoch adds just one more media company to his empire, DirecTV?

ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, this would be by far the biggest acquisition of his career, even greater, in many ways, than picking up 20th Century Fox Pictures or building the Fox TV network, because what will happen is, if he gets this, he’ll pretty soon have a monopoly in the U.S., because he’ll be in a position to blow out EchoStar, which is the sort of second-place company. And then we’ll have a situation globally where there will be two companies, in effect, that have all the satellite television, and they’ve divvied up the world between them — Murdoch and Vivendi Universal, which owns Canal+ , which is the European satellite giant that covers all the countries that Murdoch doesn’t. So we’ll have a global duopoly on what is emerging pretty rapidly as the most significant way people get television to their homes.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what DirecTV is.

ROBERT McCHESNEY: DirecTV is a satellite service, that’s done in digital, not analog, format, so you can get a higher-quality picture. And you can get hundreds of channels easily when you subscribe to the service. It’s rapidly growing in the United States. And the growth rate should continue to grow quite a bit, because it is, in many ways, preferable to cable. If you’re just into watching television, it can be preferable to cable. And so, it’s, you know, really a license to print money, once you get the system going. The startup costs tend to be fairly high, but once you get people, like with the cable, who’s paying their $20- or $30-a-month fee to get it, you’re just adding up a lot of money very quickly.

AMY GOODMAN: The effects of media mergers, megamergers, are being felt throughout the industry. In January, CNN fired some 400 staffers, many of whom had been with CNN since its infancy. They were escorted out of buildings by guards. According to an article in Brill’s Content called “CNN’s Free Fall,” many CNN insiders fear that management is directing the network away from its commitment to delivering hard, breaking news and imitating Fox and MSNBC in a desperate grab for ratings. Last week, ABC laid off 85 people. Some 20 producers will leave ABC’s primetime news magazines, including 20/20 and Primetime Live. In addition, 20/20 was moved from its popular Friday night slot, which it has successfully occupied since '87, to Wednesday nights. Danny Schechter, can you talk about these latest developments and how that fits into the media picture? Danny, are you there? Well, we'll go to Danny in a second. What about Bob McChesney?

ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, I can certainly talk about some of this, as well as Danny. And this is really part of a long-term trend. It goes back to the mid-'80s. As big conglomerates started buying up the news media, the TV networks and then the cable networks, like CNN, and the big newspaper chains, one of the first things they did is they would lay off as many reporters and editors as possible, because those people cost them money but didn't generate revenues. And they’d replace harder news or investigative journalism with easier-to-cover stories.

And I think what happened at CNN, and what’s going on now, is just more of that, a continuation of that process. At CNN, it’s most striking, because this was an extraordinarily profitable subsidiary of AOL Time Warner. I think in 1999 — and my numbers are pretty close, though they’re not exact — they had revenues of something like $1.3 billion for CNN, and their costs were only $950 million. I mean, they cleared $350 [million] in cash, that they brought into AOL Time Warner. That’s a rate of return that even Bill Gates would find acceptable. But at the same time, that wasn’t acceptable to AOL Time Warner’s management, because they looked at Fox News Channel, which is generating the same sort $350 million return, but their costs were half of those of CNN, because Fox News Channel doesn’t do any journalism. They simply have people go on the air and pontificate. And now CNN says, “Why should we — you know, we can make even more money if we imitate Fox. We’ll make the same profit. Our costs will be less. Our profit will be higher.” So, I think that’s the pressure behind the shake-ups at CNN and the tremendous downward pressure that corporations are putting on journalism to sort of generate profit first and foremost, regardless of what it does for the quality of our information.

AMY GOODMAN: I’ve been watching Headline News for a long time. And the change is, to say the least, dramatic. There are many fewer news reports. I mean, not that these news reports were always good, to say the least, but you can read between the lines and get a sense of something that’s going on, to begin to think about what’s happening. And now all of those reporters who were on the ground, we’re not seeing any of those packaged — we’re seeing much fewer of those packaged news reports, and it’s just faces, people who are not journalists, who are narrating video footage, going from one story to the next, with a lot of sort of cartoonish gimmickry throughout.

ROBERT McCHESNEY: You’re absolutely right. And this isn’t simply on CNN. CNN, I think, is notable because it had a reputation for being more concerned with serious news than other media. But this cuts all across our journalism culture. I mean, the joke about local TV news is there’s absolutely nothing to do with journalism whatsoever on it. You know, you probably —

DANNY SCHECHTER: Well, I worked —

ROBERT McCHESNEY: Go ahead, Danny.

DANNY SCHECHTER: I worked at both ABC and CNN. And, you know, there’s been a diluting of news content and a dumbing down of news that’s been going on for quite some time. Bob McChesney is absolutely right that this has been happening consistently. But there are some new developments, Bob. I’d like to get your thinking about this, you know, where various networks that have been competitive with each other are now talking about actually cooperating, with CNN maybe providing news, let’s say, to CBS, with Vivendi Universal buying NBC. Apparently there was a deal that GE didn’t go for because it didn’t come up to what they wanted, but they, apparently, with their Honeywell purchase, want to get out of the broadcast business. And so, the new — you know, the head of Dateline has now become the president of NBC News. Andy Lack, the former CBS producer turned NBC producer turned NBC president, is now the president of NBC overall. But I’m told that there may be moves afoot to actually restructure even further, because synergy means wanting to have both the network and a studio. And Vivendi Universal, using USA Networks as its sort of front because of foreign ownership rules, may make a move for GE. That may be the next big acquisition. You heard it here first. And CNN may — and Fox News may end up providing news to other networks. Do you think that’s feasible?

ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, I think you listed like three or four things that I’ve been following in the business press, as well. And I think they all make a lot of sense from a capitalist perspective. GE owns NBC, but it has no other media holdings. So it’s either got to like fish or cut bait. You know, it’s got to either buy a film studio and a book publisher, or it’s got to sell off NBC to someone like Vivendi Universal, who’s got that. And also, likewise, the way corporate journalism works, CBS, which is owned by Viacom now, which is enormous, they look at their news division, and they say, “We can’t — this doesn’t make capitalist sense for us if we’re only running a half-hour daily news show. We’ve got to have a 24-hour news service. So if we’re even going to keep having news on CBS, we’ve got to hook up with either Fox or probably CNN, someone who’s got a 24-hour service, so we can get more commercial mileage out of our assets.”

DANNY SCHECHTER: But, in other words, what we’re seeing [inaudible] —

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Danny.

DANNY SCHECHTER: I’m sorry. I think what we’re seeing is, you know, fewer sources and a narrowing, even further, of the news spectrum. I mean, the whole point about Fox, which is very true, during the last election, there was more political punditry than political reporting. And we’re moving into the area where opinion and information and journalism are becoming sort of indistinguishable from each other. And so, Fox can call Sean Hannity news, as part of the news network. And we see this happening across the spectrum, where more and more talking heads, which are far cheaper than real journalists, get more and more air time.

And this is a pattern that I think is very discouraging. Media Channel has been documenting this. Mike Wallace was on a panel we did last week at the Freedom Forum. And, you know, he himself, although defending the traditions of CBS, was sort of acknowledging this. I mean, I was surprised to find — I don’t know if you heard this one, Amy — that Mike Wallace says he voted for Ralph Nader, because he’s so disgusted with what’s going on. So, you have a lot of people who have been in the news business for a long time, and once they begin to really start talking about it, they sound like Robert McChesney. They become critics.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both very much for being with us, for that quick tour of the media multinational landscape. Danny Schechter, the news dissector, is editor of MediaChannel.org, and you can find it right there on the website. And Bob McChesney, well-known media critic, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy.

And that does it for today’s program. If you want to order a cassette copy, you can call 1-800-735-0230. That’s 1-800-735-0230. If you want to email us, it’s mail@democracynow.org. That’s mail, M-A-I-L, at democracynow.org. Democracy Now! is produced by the intrepid and indomitable, facing very serious odds, producers, Kris Abrams and Brad Simpson. I want to thank you very much for bearing with us. And Anthony 1857 Sloan is doing a remarkable job under these conditions. From the embattled substudios of WBAI, from the studios of the banned and the fired, from the studios of our listeners, thanks for listening. I’m Amy Goodman.