Media Critiques
As many of America’s largest corporations are being charged with felonies and executive wrongdoing is being exposed, big business influence on government policy is becoming apparent.
Less noticed is big business influence on the news media. A review of the press shows that U.S. corporate-owned newspapers seem reluctant to conclude that the problems are systematic, whereas alternative and overseas media clearly see a pattern.
Enron, the former energy giant and once the seventh largest corporation in the United States, had direct ties to the Bush administration, according to left-leaning British daily newspaper, The Guardian. George Bush received $800,000 in presidential campaign funds from Enron, and Vice President Dick Cheney met with executives to work out the national energy policies in the first months of the new administration.
The Nation, the oldest progressive magazine in the country, is reporting that Ken Lay, former chairman of Enron and close friend of the president, was “the single biggest contributor to Bush's [electoral] campaign.” Bush returned the favor, the magazine says, by appointing members to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, who in turn ignored Enron as it booked illicit profits. These members insisted California’s energy crisis was the state’s own problem and refused to apply a price cap on wholesale energy prices.
According to Employee Benefit News magazine, Enron employees lost approximately $1 billion in retirement plan assets. Meanwhile, Ken Lay has not, to date, faced any formal charges.
To take another example, Chattanooga Times Free Press says Bernard Ebbers, CEO of telecommunications giant WorldCom, was charged with orchestrating one of biggest accounting frauds in the U.S. corporate history. Ebbers was indicted on three criminal charges in March of 2004. WorldCom became the second largest long-distance company when it acquired MCI in 1999.
The hometown Clarion-Ledger reported that after WorldCom was charged with artificially boosting its 2002 earnings by $3.85 billion, the company decided to lay off 17,000 workers and move of its headquarters out of Clinton, Miss.
WorldCom was suspended in July 2003 from acquiring new and renewed contracts but, according to the Washington Post, was granted $100 million worth of government work from U.S. agencies and remains the government’s largest telecommunications provider.
The New York Times features President Bush saying, “Dishonesty will not be tolerated in the boardrooms of America.”
The case of the fifth largest cable company offers another example. The Guardian says, John Rigas, the CEO of Adelphia Communications, was charged with using more that $1 billion of the company funds.
The online San Francisco-based news magazine, www.AlterNet.org, says the company’s accountants made a footnote in the earnings filing of the loan but failed to explain the reason behind the loan. The alternative website says Rigas took $3.1 billion.
The National Review, the oldest U.S. conservative magazine, quotes Richard Gephardt, a 2004 candidate in the Democratic presidential primaries, saying, "It's about money. ... These companies want to do things, and then they want to escape responsibility for what they do, and it's wrong."
In an online story in the June 2003, Forbes magazine presented the accusations in the trial against Tyco’s former chairman and chief executive officer, Dennis Kozlowski, and former chief operating officer, Mark Swartz. Without comment, the Forbes story offered contradictory claims and actions by the new management at Tyco International Ltd.
In a more belligerent tone, The Guardian, reported that the two executives were charged with looting the company of $170 million in “unauthorized bonuses and forgiven loans and $430 million for selling the company’s stock while keeping the stock prices artificially high.” If convicted on all 32 counts of grand larceny, falsifying business records and violating state business laws, both men could face 30 years in prison. In court, lawyers for Kozlowski and Swartz said the executives did not try to hide the payments. The judge recently declared a mistrial.
The non-profit website,www.CorporateCrimeReporter.com, says, “Corporations define the laws under which they live.” The website lists the top 100 convicted corporate felons in the decade of the 1990s and details their crimes in 14 major categories. The website notes that although the Department of Justice publishes an annual statistics on street crime, it does not include the 56,000 American workers who die every year either from the on-the-job accidents or from occupational diseases. The DOJ does not include price-fixing, corporate fraud, pollution or public corruption in its report.
The third largest U.S. daily newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, observes, “In the aggregate, white-collar and corporate crimes cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars annually -- far more than conventional categories of crime such as burglary and robbery.”
Then why is it that the commercial news media continue to give more column-inches of newspaper space and more airtime on television to blue-collar crime than to white-collar crime? The mainstream news media are increasingly big businesses. Could it be that reporting that prominent corporate persons are repeat felons is not in the interest of big media?
© Copyright World Internet News 2006-07
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