PR News

The Death of Journalism And The Triumph Of Infomercials

Quick…name the fifth-largest television network in the United States.

No, it’s not CNN. With 130 million viewers a month, the fifth largest is “Banana-Vision,” the informal moniker for the Wal-Mart TV Network.

For those of you who missed the New York Times feature Feb. 21, Wal-Mart launched this in-store programming in 1998. The network, which runs in most Wal-Mart stores, previews movies, features clips of sporting events and concerts, and, of course, inundates the environment with commercials from Wal-Mart suppliers.

Nielsen studies show that Wal-Mart customers watch the programming an average of seven minutes each visit.

Right now, five minutes of every broadcast hour are devoted to corporate messaging that promotes Wal-Mart’s community service and employment practices. Occasionally, Banana-Vision slips in some news coverage.

The network is not controlled locally. Local store managers can’t even turn it off. It is a centralized corporate broadcast centrally programmed to weigh in on issues. How long will it be before inveterate political operatives start buying 10-second spots? If Wal-Mart bans sales to political parties, the politicos simply will take a soft money approach by penetrating this channel, or ones like it, via “Concerned Citizens for a Wonderful America” or some thing like that.

If overt political advocacy by the corporation itself is deemed injudicious, there’s likewise no end of subliminal formats to buttress a politician’s hold on the silent majority that shops Wal-Mart.

The launch of Banana-Vision occurred at a crucial juncture:

• First, the rise of narrow casting has meant so many multiple news venues that, for most viewers, one is just like the other. In this flattening out of electronic media, ABC, CBS and NBC are competing with an untold number of cable stations and online venues for ever-smaller audiences. And none of the nets have authority the way they did for most Americans during Walter Cronkite’s heyday.
• Second, Cronkite’s “children” have been thoroughly discredited. CNN’s Tailgate, the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times ,CBS’ Rathergate. These are just a few of the recent media scandals that have now put reporters and journalists a notch above used-car salesman in national reputation (or a notch below depending on whom you ask).

Those of us who deal with major reporters know, for example, that in the aftermath of the Dan Rather debacle, some primetime reporters have become not more circumspect but merely less courageous.

It is getting easier to sign on with an interested news medium, which is essentially what Armstrong Williams did. Indeed, current patterns of desensitization have encouraged dozens of such rigged media events. President Bush even had a shill at his own news conferences, but that’s just a one-day story.

The corporations, politicians, journalists and PR pros participating in these shameless frauds may still find themselves reproved by an independent reporter or two, but that’s a tiny price to pay for the overall benefits of controlling the mass message on an ongoing basis.

None of this is new, of course. The difference today is that the massive media consolidation of the last decade has yielded the worst of two worlds: diverse new media outlets, which have diluted the power of legitimate news media gatekeepers; and a profusion of private, corporate and/or political messages.

In any matter of public or corporate crisis, today’s most independent communications media probably are the blogs (see related story on p. 8). They’re independent in the sense that both sides of any issue can express themselves with maximum freedom and, to be sure, license.

Yet blogs aren’t news venues in any event; they’re partisan broadsheets. Call them the Fifth Estate. Meanwhile, the power of the Fourth Estate as an independent and fair-minded watchdog continues to crumble.

Richard S. Levick, Esq., is president of Levick Strategic Communications, which has directed the media in hundreds of high-profile cases, including Guantanamo Bay. He can be reached at rlevick@levick.com.