Big media is in crisis.
This, anyway was the thesis of a talk that Bob Griffith, a veteran of radio, gave Durango’s Rotary Club on Tuesday night.
Former vice president and general manager of Los Angeles radio stations with 31 years’ broadcast experience, Griffith said these days, there is little truth in journalism, particularly the kinds of journalism practiced by big, for-profit operations such as Fox News, MSNBC, CNN and radio outlets throughout the country.
He traced journalism’s downfall to the deregulation of the airwaves that took place from the 1980s onward, which allowed media conglomerates to own previously unimaginable proportions of the market.
Before the Telecommunications Act, companies and individuals were forbidden from owning more than 14 radio stations. Almost immediately after its passage in 1996, Lowry May’s Clear Channel Communications bought 1,200 radio stations.
Griffith said now, about six companies own every FM radio station in America.
He said this was disastrous for Americans, as conglomerates’ fidelity is to profit, not service to the public.
He pointed to Minot, N.D., where Clear Channel owned every local radio station. In 2002, a Canadian Pacific Railway train derailed, leaking 240,000 gallons of toxic anhydrous ammonia, engulfing the city with a poisonous vapor cloud.
When officials tried calling Clear Channel’s local radio stations, hoping to alert residents to the spill in time for them to evacuate, no one picked up, and every radio station continued its usual Clear Channel programming.
In the meantime, the ammonia cloud killed one person and injured more than 1,000.
Clear Channel claimed it had no responsibility to warn residents, saying that was the job of the city’s emergency-alert system.
Griffith said corporate consolidation had caused similar journalistic perversions in television news.
He said, in 1990, it took 50 companies to reach 90 percent of the American populace, whereas today, there are “six companies that provide you with everything that you hear and everything that you see – Disney, Fox, Comcast NBC, Time Warner, CBS and Viacom. Those six companies reach 90 percent of the American populace,” he said.
The media are absconding from their responsibilities to the public, and Americans frequently are misinformed, he said.
He cited a Washington Post poll that found 69 percent of the American public erroneously believes Saddam Hussein had something to do with the Jihadist attack on America on Sept. 11, 2001.
Network and cable news programs, he said, tend to focus on “gotcha” politics, politicians’ indiscretions, car chases, boisterously repugnant characters like Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and shiny entertainment news.
“We are basically watching train wrecks and carnival sideshows – we’re populist voyeurs,” he said.
In conclusion, he urged the audience to “pay attention to what’s going on around you, and be very, very careful what these people are trying to sell you, your kids and your grandchildren.”
Griffith is a partner and senior adviser with Fuel360 Media Sales in Pasadena, Calif., which manages multiplatform vehicles.
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
