By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer
Advocates and opinionators are always warning of "slippery slopes." It's a cliche but one that has a nice alliterative allure. It's too early to say how many slopes we started, or continued, slipping down in 2004, but it was definitely a slopeful year.
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It was a good year for bad news, a bad year for good news, and a bad year for the news business. But as the year wound down, the Bush administration, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and all their talkative conservative supporters got a surprise of their own. The troops themselves were heard from, and their complaint was not a lack of support from the media but rather from their own leaders. A young soldier stood up at a Rumsfeld appearance in Iraq to complain about the crucial lack of armor for Humvees and other vehicles that are repeatedly targeted by Iraqi insurgents and fanatics.
The story got big play on television, partly because the embarrassing moment was caught on videotape. Could there come a day when media power is concentrated in so few hands that a story could effectively be suppressed? Fortunately, Americans are still protected somewhat by diversity in ownership of the news media, so that even if something were banned from one group of stations, it could still be seen elsewhere. But that's another of the slippery slopes that get more slopey, if not more slippery, all the time. The Bush administration looks favorably on media consolidation, having generously increased the number of stations that one conglomerate can own. Thus the flow of information is controlled by fewer and fewer corporate empires -- run by emperors who tend to be politically like-minded.
Near year's end, billionaire conservative Rupert Murdoch was promoting cooperation between his Fox empire and the sprawling Clear Channel station group. The media conglomerates omnivorously devour one another and seem to become one great mass -- a ruling elite that can be thought of as a virtual second government. With the White House and Congress controlled by the same political forces that own the media, the possibilities for disseminating damaging or potentially unpopular truth get fewer, and the opportunities for spreading disinformation disguised as news grow.
The bigger a conglomerate, the more bottom-liney it becomes. This has always been decried, and rightly, as icy fallout from merger mania. But maybe obsession with profits is preferable to using the power of the media for furthering political goals. For the moment, there is the proverbial no relief in sight. We're in the valley of the slopes, with all signs pointing downward and seemingly no way out.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24388-2004Dec24.html
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