Page 278 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Med a Watch Groups |

Some scholars have emerged as leaders of different kinds of media watch
organizations. A notable example is Robert McChesney, a media histo-
rian who is founder, president, and board chairman of Free Press, a policy-
oriented organization emphasizing democratization of U.S. media systems.
Active in media literacy circles vigilant against increasing corporate control
of the national communication sphere, McChesney and his allies in and be-
yond academia have foregrounded political economy, where the template for
journalism is constantly being transformed. Ben Bagdikian, former dean of
the graduate journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley, laid
out the rationale for emphasizing media ownership and control in his clas-
sic Media Monopoly, which through successive new editions chronicled the
ever-shrinking number of major corporations controlling the vast majority
of U.S. media. Much of the media activism of politically active groups such
as MoveOn.org and Free Press concentrates on policy issues, watching media
less for what it says than for who controls what gets said, and through what
avenues.

“FoLLow ThE monEy!”

The famed Watergate source Deep Throat’s instructions to reporter Bob
Woodward in All the President’s Men—“Follow the money!”—applies to the
criticism not only of media but of media watch groups. Accuracy in Media
(AIM), a conservative voice founded in 1969 by Reed Irvine and now chaired
by his son, Donald Irvine, makes the case that Media Matters, for example, is
beholden to the Democratic Party and especially to Hillary Clinton, and that
its partial funding by billionaire George Soros through the Democracy Alliance
contributes to a liberal bias in its reporting. Diverting attention from the pre-
cipitating phraseology in the aforementioned Imus case to how it was reported,
AIM suggested that “something is fishy” in the Imus affair, blaming ideological
bias born of Media Matters’s funding source for its approach to reporting Imus’s
comments. AIM, which claims to have started with a budget of $200, does not
disclose the sources of its own reported annual budget of more than $1 million
on its Web site, where it invites “strapped” donors to give the organization their
cars if they lack cash to donate. Mediatransparency.org documents a steady
stream of funding—millions of dollars over the years—for AIM from various
iterations of the Scaife Foundation, perhaps the single most significant funder
of rightist political causes in the United States with more than $340 million in-
vested so far in ventures that include the Arkansas Project, which unsuccessfully
sought to destroy President Bill Clinton with reports that included unsubstanti-
ated murder allegations. Just ahead of the 2000 presidential election, Pittsburgh
Tribune-Review publisher Richard Mellon Scaife demanded that all photos of
and prominent references to Democratic candidate Al Gore be removed from
the paper’s front page, leaving Republican George W. Bush to dominate that key
space. Searching AIM’s Web site reveals no reference to that affair.
Funding remains a key determinant of any media watch group’s sustainabil-
ity. AIM and MRC are the major media watch groups on the right, with MRC