The Death of Local News

22 April 2003, Paul Schmelzer, AlterNet

Tune into the evening news on Madison, Wisconsin's Fox TV affiliate and behold the future of local news. In the program's concluding segment, "The Point," Mark Hyman rants against peace activists ("wack-jobs"), the French ("cheese-eating surrender monkeys"), progressives ("loony left") and the so-called liberal media, usually referred to as the "hate-America crowd" or the "Axis of Drivel." Colorful, if creatively anemic, this is TV's version of talk radio, with the precisely tanned Hyman playing a second-string Limbaugh.

Fox 47's right-wing rants may be the future of hometown news, but -- believe it or not -- it's not the program's blatant ideological bias that is most worrisome. Here's the real problem: Hyman isn't the station manager, a local crank, or even a journalist. He is the Vice President of Corporate Communications for the station's owner, the Sinclair Broadcast Group. And this segment of the local news isn't exactly local. Hyman's commentary is piped in from the home office in Baltimore, MD, and mixed in with locally-produced news. Sinclair aptly calls its innovative strategy "NewsCentral" - it is very likely to spell the demise of local news as we know it.

Like many a media empire, Sinclair grew through a combination of acquisitions, clever manipulations of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules, and considerable lobbying campaigns. Starting out as a single UHF station in Baltimore in 1971, the company started its frenzied expansion in 1991 when it began using "local marketing agreements" as a way to circumvent FCC rules that bar a company from controlling two stations in a single market. These "LMAs" allow Sinclair to buy one station outright and control another by acquiring not its license but its assets. Today, Sinclair touts itself as "the nation's largest commercial television broadcasting company not owned by a network." You've probably never heard of them because the 62 stations they run -- garnering 24 percent of the national TV audience -- fly the flags of the networks they broadcast: ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and the WB.

TV Barn's Mark Jeffries calls Sinclair the "Clear Channel of local news," a reference to the San Antonio, Texas, media giant that has grown from 40 to more than 1,200 stations today thanks to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which relaxed radio ownership rules. But the parallels extend beyond their growth strategies. Jeffries describes Sinclair as having a "fiercely right-wing approach that makes Fox News Channel look like a model of objectivity," while Clear Channel is best known for sponsoring pro-war "Rallies for America" during the Iraq conflict. And like Clear Channel's CEO L. Lowry Mays -- a major Republican donor and onetime business associate of George W. Bush -- the Sinclair family, board, and executives ply the GOP with big money. Since 1997, they have donated well over $200,000 to Republican candidates.

Sinclair's news department also takes a page out of Clear Channel's book of non-localized programming. According to Sinclair's website, NewsCentral is a "revolutionary news model" that introduces "local news in programming in markets that otherwise could not support news." Begun in 2002, it's being tested in five not-so-small markets: Minneapolis, Flint (MI), Oklahoma City (OK), Raleigh (NC), and Rochester (NY). (Hyman's segment, "The Point," however, is aired on all 62 of its stations.) In these five cities, the hour-long newscast combines local broadcasting with prepackaged news. To maintain the appearance of local news, the Baltimore on-air staff is coached on the intricacies of correct local pronunciations. Or the weatherman, safely removed from the thunderstorms in, say, Minneapolis, will often engage in scripted banter with the local anchor to maintain the pretense: "Should I bring an umbrella tomorrow, Don?" "You bet, Hal, it looks pretty ugly out there..."

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Dress Down

Why America's Plutocrats Gobble up $1,500 Hot Dogs
In the final part of a series, Julian Borger examines the inequality of the Bush era
5 November 2003, Julian Borger, The Guardian

Nearly half the benefits of Mr Bush's $1.35 trillion tax cut in 2001 went to the richest 1%, while 60% of this year's cuts will go to taxpayers with incomes of more than $100,000, according to the tax policy centre run by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution in Washington. Mr Bush also fought hard to repeal an inheritance tax that affected only the wealthiest 2%, as well as cutting capital gains tax and trying to abolish the tax on dividends. The Bush cabinet also stands out for its big money background. Every member is a millionaire and, the Centre for Public Integrity says, its total net worth is more than 10 times that of the Clinton cabinet. President Bush may not be the cause of America's unequal society, but the members of his administration arguably personify a new plutocracy.

In the view of Kevin Phillips, an economic historian and the author of a history of America's rich, Wealth and Democracy, you have to go back more than 100 years to find an era when big money and government were in such a tight embrace. "It's the second plutocracy after the gilded age," Mr Phillips said. "Laissez-faire is a pretence. Government power and preferment have been used by the rich, not shunned. As wealth concentration grows, especially near the crest of a drawn-out boom, so has upper-bracket control of politics and its ability to shape its own preferment."

Yet it would be hard to imagine a country less ripe for social upheaval. Mr Bush may be politically vulnerable in the approach to elections a year from now, but he remains favourite to win, and his opponents in the Democratic party try to avoid the language of class warfare at all costs. The "liberal" label can still spell death at the polls. For outsiders, the absence of class-based politics is the enduring mystery of American society. Among US analysts it is a matter of ideological disagreement.

David Brooks, a commentator at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, believes the divide is cultural rather than economic. It is the divide between the urban, cosmopolitan and liberal culture of the coasts where there are "sun-dried tomato concoctions" on restaurant menus - what he calls Blue America - and the conservative, church-going, gun-owning, patriotic and mainly white culture of Red America. Red America eats meatloaf and votes for George Bush because it identifies with his cultural values. Its people are not envious of the top 1% of the population, Mr Brooks argues, because in Red America they never meet them. Instead, they consider themselves lucky to live in their own modest communities where prices are so low they see little they cannot afford. "I didn't find many who assessed their own place in society according to their income," he reported. "They don't compare themselves with faraway millionaires who appear on their TV screens. They compare themselves with their neighbours."

Paul Krugman, a Princeton economist and Mr Brooks' liberal counterpart on the comment pages of the New York Times, argues that this cultural divide is more manipulated than natural, and serves to mask the society's ingrained inequity. "There has been a tremendously successful campaign to shift the focus from economic elitism to cultural elitism," Mr Krugman said. "Because the president uses short words and talks tough, he is seen as an ordinary guy."

Certainly, most Americans appear to take Mr Bush at face value - as a plainspoken, homespun Texan, rather than the scion of a wealthy East Coast family. It is hard to imagine his real social background passing so unremarked in a British election campaign.

His party has also toyed with the cultural imagery of class, in one instance arranging for party loyalists to wear street clothes and workmen's hard hats at a rally for the Bush tax cuts. The memo sent out to would-be demonstrators stressed that "If people want to participate - AND WE DO NEED BODIES - they must be DRESSED DOWN, appear to be REAL WORKER types etc." In the end, the televised rally involved the president's supporters dressed as the working poor, cheering for more money to go to the rich. It is hard to think of a more fitting tableau for Bush's America.

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Stay Well

Land Where Calling an Ambulance is First Step to Bankruptcy
The second in a three-part series on Bush's America looks at the inflated hospital bills facing the uninsured poor
4 November 2003, Julian Borger, The Guardian

Rose Shaffer's heart attack taught her a lot of things that, as a nurse, she should have known. She learnt it pays to eat carefully and exercise regularly. And she learnt the hard way that if you cannot afford medical insurance in America, you better hope you don't get sick.

A Chicago hospital saved Mrs Shaffer's life but she feels it is now trying to take it back. Since that frantic October night three years ago, the hospital owners, a Christian, non-profit foundation, have hounded her for crushing bills she could not afford, partly because as an uninsured patient she had been charged double. The hospital sent debt collectors after her who called her all hours of the night, at home and work, until she gave in and was forced into bankruptcy. Now, at the age most people are thinking of retiring, she has to work long hours seven days a week at a nursing agency for the next three years to have any hope of holding on to her last asset, a suburban bungalow. "When I was young I thought that, when you reach 60, if you don't have anything, then you're nothing. Well, I'm 63 and I don't have nothing, and I'm not going to get anything," Mrs Shaffer said, sitting at her kitchen table sifting through some of her latest bills. "The whole system is messed up. In this country the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and no matter how much you work, you're going to get poorer."

In the US today, there are nearly 44 million people in her position - without medical insurance in a country that does not guarantee basic healthcare - and the crisis is deepening. In the three years since George Bush took office, the ranks of the uninsured have risen by 10%, or four million people. The government will pay if you are destitute but not if you earn enough to keep above the poverty line - about $18,000 (£10,600) for a family of four. In theory, employers are supposed to provide health insurance but more opt not to, and buying cover individually is either very expensive or impossible if you have a "pre-existing condition." Consequently, 15% of the population, most of them the working poor, live in the fear that an accident or sudden illness could plunge them into debt. The uninsured will typically put off going to see a doctor in the hope that their medical problems will pass. They tend to seek treatment only when their condition is critical.

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The crisis has become an issue in the presidential campaign. Remedies vary in cost and ambition, from schemes to expand Medicaid and Medicare (the government-funded schemes for the destitute and elderly) to cover the rest of the uninsured, financed by repealing the Bush administration's tax cuts, to the far more modest market-oriented proposals put forward by the White House itself, based on tax breaks for the self-insured. History suggests that, whoever is elected, little will change. The hospital business and the $400bn insurance industry have too much to lose, as do corporate employers who would be asked to foot much of the bill. Much like an uninsured patient, the US knows there is something wrong, but it is unable so far to face the cost of the cure.

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Soup's On

Long Queue at Drive-in Soup Kitchen
George Bush's America, the wealthiest nation in history, faces a growing poverty crisis. In the first of a three-part series Julian Borger takes the pulse of the US with elections just a year away
3 November 2003, Julian Borger, The Guardian

George Bush's America is the wealthiest and most powerful nation the world has ever known, but at home it is being gnawed away from the inside by persistent and rising poverty. The three million Americans who have lost their jobs since Mr Bush took office in January 2001 have yet to find new work in a largely jobless recovery, and they are finding that the safety net they assumed was beneath them has long since unravelled. There is not much left to stop them falling.

Last year alone, another 1.7 million Americans slipped below the poverty line, bringing the total to 34.6 million, one in eight of the population. Over 13 million of them are children. In fact, the US has the worst child poverty rate and the worst life expectancy of all the world's industrialised countries, and the plight of its poor is worsening.

The ranks of the hungry are increasing in step. About 31 million Americans were deemed to be "food insecure" (they literally did not know where their next meal was coming from). Of those, more than nine million were categorised by the US department of agriculture as experiencing real hunger, defined by the US department of agriculture as an "uneasy or painful sensation caused by lack of food due to lack of resources to obtain food." That was two years ago, before the recession really began to bite. Partial surveys suggest the problem has deepened considerably since then. In 25 major cities the need for emergency food rose an average of 19% last year. Another indicator is the demand for food stamps, the government aid programme of last resort. The number of Americans on stamps has risen from 17 million to 22 million since Mr Bush took office.

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Clinton's welfare reform set a time limit on how long the poor and unemployed could draw social security payments. It helped force people back into work with the encouragement of an array of federally funded job training programmes. It worked well while the economy was booming, cutting the number on welfare from 12 million to five million in a few years. But now there are no jobs. Those who went to work under welfare reform are among the first to be fired, and often find that welfare is no longer available to them. Some have used up their lifetime maximum. Some have accumulated too many assets to qualify, such as a car or a house that they do not want to sell for fear of falling yet further into destitution.

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So, while poverty rates have been rising in the past few years, the number of Americans on welfare has been steadily declining. Another impact of the 1996 welfare reform was that the unemployed were obliged to take service jobs at the minimum wage (now $5.15 per hour) without benefits such as paid holidays or health insurance. On paper they were part of the success of the welfare-to-work project, but the jobs stocking supermarket shelves or cleaning offices usually left them worse off, especially if someone in the family fell sick.

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The harsh impact of welfare reform was initially mitigated by the 90s boom and Clinton-era social programmes to support the working poor and retrain the unemployed. Those programmes are now disappearing under an administration which fundamentally does not believe government should have a direct role in alleviating poverty. Melissa Pardue, a specialist on poverty at the market-oriented Heritage Foundation, reflects the beliefs of many in the administration when she argues welfare reform has not gone far enough. "The impact of the recession would have been far greater without welfare reform," she said. "The people who continue to be affected are not working. People who choose not to get a job are not going to see more income. It's all the more reason to give greater incentives to looking for work."

The government still distributes food stamps, but they are worth on average only about $160 (£100) a month, not enough to buy food for a family with no other income. Furthermore, more than 10 million "food insecure" Americans, at risk from hunger, do not apply for them. Often they are unaware they are eligible. Welfare reform pushed them out of a system that they have lost contact with.

A study this year by Washington-based think tank the Urban Institute found that 63% of this forgotten category sometimes or often run out of food each month. All these factors explain why, although the current slump in America has not been as deep as the last major recession a decade ago, the food lines this time are longer. They also explain why hunger remains a largely invisible problem. The Americans in the food lines often do not show up in the statistics and usually do not turn up for elections. "Hunger is a hidden thing," said Lynn Brantley, who runs a food bank in Washington where the very poor live within sight of Congress. "It's something we don't really want to look at. We don't want to admit it."

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Reagan Rewrites

"For Reagan apologists to act as if his record on AIDS was anything short of tragic is both inaccurate and deeply offensive to the memory of the 60,000 people who died of AIDS during Reagan's presidency," said Shana Naomi Krochmal, director of communications and public affairs for the STOP AIDS Project. "At a time when our nation could have led the way in preventing transmission and fighting stigma and discrimination against people with HIV, Reagan offered no leadership -- only silence."

Detractors of CBS' The Reagans Rewrite, Distort AIDS History
Cathy Renna, GLAAD News Media Director, 4 November 2003