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CNN & Time Retract; Wrongful Conviction; Internet Mergers; First Amendment; Blockbusters; Cincinnati Enquirer vs. Chiquita

Sunday, July 5, 1998

TIME magazine and CNN retract their story charging nerve gas was used during the Vietnam war; a Cincinnati paper renounces its own series criticizing a major corporation; host Brian Lehrer asks if there will be a lasting impact from the live press events with President Clinton in China; and journalists tell how they help overturn wrongful convictions. All that plus summer blockbusters! On the next On the Media from NPR.

Time/CNN Retraction
Time and CNN have retracted their report alleging the US used nerve gas in Laos during the Vietnam war. First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams was hired BY CNN to investigate the report. He joins host Brian Lehrer to explain his findings.

Banana Slip Up: The Enquirer Apologizes to Chiquita
The Cincinnati Enquirer apologized for a report highly critical of Chiquita Brand Foods. They fired the lead reporter for stealing voice mail as part of his investigation. They printed a statement saying the report had "untrue conclusions" but didn't say what those conclusions were. It's all raised thorny ethical and factual questions about this case and about what's okay and what's not in investigative reporting. And it seems to be one more effort on the part of major corporations to attack the press using legal tactics OTHER THAN libel suits.

Guests Deni Elliot to the University of Montana Practical Ethics Center and John Fox, Editor of the Cincinnati City Beat, take a look at the issue.

Writing a Wrong: Reporting That Overturns Wrongful Convictions
After serving 25 years on a life sentence for a crime she didn't commit a Rochester, New York woman was recently freed. She has a journalist to thank. Investigative reporters Gary Craig and David Protess, who've worked to free innocent people in prison, discuss why and how they do what they do.

Clinton in China
Will the President's uncensored media events in China mean a more open future for that country? Orville Schell, Dean of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, and George Wehrfritz, Beijing Bureau Chief for Newsweek, have a free and open debate.

Commentary: Buying up the Net
Robert McChesney, Professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism, says the idea of the internet as a free, open, non-commercial forum is being taken over by the realities of corporate conglomerates.

The History of the First Amendment
The Declaration of Independence spoke of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; the Constitution's First Amendment against restrictions on religion, speech and the press, speaks to the guarantee of democracy. OTM and Burt Neuborne, professor at New York University School of Law take a look at the First Amendment and ask if press freedoms are being more broadly interpreted these days compared to the past.

Hoping to Crash and Burn
Just how big are summer blockbusters? About the size of that meteor currently hurtling towards earth. Why is so much is riding on the back of a 400 foot lizard? And how has the blockbuster changed the way movies are made? Anne Thompson, West Coast Editor of Premiere Magazine, fills us in.

WNYC archives id: 24022

Buying Up the Net by Robert McChesney

This week on On the Media, Robert McChesney, of Madison's School of Journalism looks at the evolution of the Internet. In five years, the Net has catapulted from free-range idea space to slaughter house for high stakes competition and commercialism. Read his report here.

Remember the heady days of the Internet? When advertisements were greeted with flames from irate netheads? That was only five years ago, but now it has as much relevance to the current situation as the War of the Roses.
AT&T's recent $32 billion purchase of cable giant TCI is being heralded by some as a positive step for Americans. "It will bring competition, finally, to local telephone service," claims FCC chair William Kennard. "It will bring broadband Internet access to the masses," claim Wall Street analysts. In fact, the AT&T purchase caps off a few weeks of deals that in combination point to the death of the Internet. No, the Internet is not going to die as a force in our society; in fact, it is only getting started!

But the Internet is now dead as an alternative force in our society. And before you dismiss me as some hopeless romantic, please hear me out. The Internet is the result of two decades of public sector planning and taxpayer subsidies. It could never have been produced by the business sector. In the early 1990's it spawned a semi-utopian culture that argued that cyberspace would provide the democratic free-for-all that our hyper-commercialized, highly concentrated media system eschews.

Then, without a shred of public discussion or debate, this public sector creation was privatized. Our friends at Wired magazine told us not to worry. The architecture of the Internet was such, they said, that when you combined it with the free market, it would produce a competitive media Valhalla, the likes of which had never been seen. In the age of the Internet, they said, the media giants and telecom firms were dinosaurs on the fast track to extinction. But look at what is happening today!

The largest telecom firms and media firms have used their existing market power and wealth to draw the Internet into their empires. How does this happen? Look at the giant media corporations . Do you really think thousands of new media companies are going to blossom on the net and drive the giants into oblivion? Think again.

The huge media giants like TimeWarner and Disney already have digital fare to plug into their web sites. They can promote their Internet activities on their old media incessantly, and they can bring advertisers over to their new media projects. The giant media firms also account for over half the venture capital in Internet start-up firms. Disney has grabbed a piece of Infoseek and GE, owner of NBC, has bought a piece of C-Net. These are both portal services, meaning that Internet users without lots of time to kill will have to go through them to get to everything else. Indeed, up to now, the Internet has not encouraged competition, but instead, mergers, like the one between TCI and AT&T. The media and telecom and computer giants realize there can be ever-greater profits for all of them if they come together in bigger and previously unimaginable alliances.
That is the crowning significance of the AT&T-TCI deal: it creates the potential for a super powerful Internet access provider that maybe only one or two other giants will be able to match.

And that is the future of the Internet. There may eventually be billions of web sites, but there will be a small number of access providers, browser services, and portals all controlled by a handful of the usual suspects. And the entire experience will be drenched in commercialism.

The journalism will be typified by Matt Drudge for the masses and business and by upscale consumer news for the classes. And the culture overall will be defined by what works best for Madison Avenue and Wall Street.

So forget the Internet. It's dead, unless we get off our duffs, organize politically, and demand that congress hold full, open hearings on its future. Because the tragedy is it doesn't have to be this way. It shouldn't be this way.

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