Corporate influence makes sure you'll never get to see this show - "Fear and Favor in the Newsroom,' a documentary showing case studies of muzzled US journalists

National Catholic Reporter, May 16, 1997 by Raymond. Schroth

On the evening of April 22, when we came to the intercessions at our Fordham Jesuit community Mass, one of the fathers announced that "at this moment" the Peruvian army was laying siege to the Japanese Embassy in Lima and that we should pray for everyone involved.

I almost jumped up and checked out of Mass to catch the assault on CNN. Here was TV news at its best. How could I afford to miss it?

But I stuck to my prayers and waited for "Nightline" for the "big picture" on what had happened. I had been to Peru during the election campaign that mysteriously brought Alberto K. Fujimori to power, and I have followed what has happened to that dazzlingly beautiful country with a mixture of confusion and sadness.

So, "Nightline." Boom! Boom! There go the government troops. There go the hostages scampering to freedom. There's Fujimori in a flak jacket wielding a gun, on the scene within minutes, gloating over his wipeout. Fujimori for president of the United States! Here's a real decision-maker. Statistics: only two dead assault troops and only one dead hostage (no word on who killed him). All 14 rebels killed. Now to our analysis: wonderful. Masterful. The rest of us have something to learn about how to handle terrorists like a champ.

Call it the give-it-a-week syndrome. That means: With any sensational news story, don't believe it till a week's follow-up has given us a better picture. Look closely at a picture in Thursday's New York Daily News of the shirtless corpse of a rebel and you'll notice that the boy has no head.

By Sunday we know the answers to the questions that Tuesday's "Nightline" should have asked. The evidence indicates that Fujimori ordered his troops to execute all the captors, including those who refused to execute their hostages and tried to surrender. Then chop them up.

As Clarence Page said on Sunday's "McLaughlin Group," to the guffaws of his co-panelists, Fujimori's is a "state terrorist government," and the rebels have a case that isn't getting much attention in the American press.

By then, National Public Radio's "Newsweek on the Air" and The New York Tymes had broadcast and published analyses and letters indicating that the rebels' main "failure" was that they were not ruthless enough. Like the Latin American teenagers they were, they liked to lay down their weapons and take off their shirts and play soccer -- which gave the Peruvian army in the tunnels a chance to blow them up. They died having killed no one, and their families were not allowed to see their corpses -- lest we have evidence on how they died.

Which brings us to "Fear and Favor in the Newsroom," a powerful documentary collection of recent case studies, produced by California Newsreel (149 Ninth St., San Francisco CA 94103; (415) 621-6196), in which some of the nation's best journalists are cut off from doing their jobs -- giving us the information we need in order to make wise political judgments.

Unfortunately, however, the only people who know about "Fear and Favor" are those who heard it discussed on Alex Jones "on the Media," on New York Public Radio's WNYC, or caught its one New York showing, with a panel discussion, at New York University in March.

These stories offend local and national corporations, which share directorships with the corporate owners of the media, corporate sponsors on whom public TV depends, and the government, which controls the press' access to a story like the Gulf War.

As far as I know, Peru's and Fujitnoti's corporate backers don't own ABC, but establishment TV news programs never care about "enemy' dead or how they died. It is presumed their deaths are good news because "we won." To consider that they died because "our side" didn't want to deal with the questions surrendered rebels might raise in court, if they could get a trial, was not allowed.

The case studies in "Fear and Favor" are familiar to anyone who has been reading for the past few years the Columbia Journalism Review, or The Nation -- particularly The Nation's special June 3, 1996, issue documenting corporate media control. But the film's extraordinary power comes from the authority of its voices.

These are no mere disgruntled amateurs teed off at their editors for not getting their way, but some of America's best journalists, prizewinners trying to do their jobs but thwarted by a newsroom culture in which management freezes out stories that make trouble and editors are supposed to think profits as well as news.

* When New York Times alumnus Bill Kovach took over the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (owned by the Cox Corporation) in 1986, his reporters published an expose of Atlanta banks that wouldn't make loans in black neighborhoods and even criticized the local god, the Coca Cola Corporation, which was under investigation by a grand jury.

It happened that a Coke executive was on the Constitution's board. In two years Kovach, who in the words of reporter Bill Dedman had inspired his staff to believe that under his leadership they would be able to "barbecue the sacred cows," was gone, and the Constitution published five days of soft "news" kissing up to Coke.