http://www.salon.com/media/media2961022.htmlStossel's humiliating counter-sting occurred too late to make it into tonight's show. But if it had, we might have pointed to the $11,000 speaking fee that he received two years ago from the American Industrial Health Council — a group that includes such companies as Du Pont, Pfizer, Proctor & Gamble and Squibb, all of which have a vested interest in many of Stossel's assaults on government regulation.
And Stossel is not alone. Many of the most famous members of the D.C. press corps -- the true power elite of American journalism -- accept high-paying corporate speaking engagements and have direct personal ties to the political candidates. The top echelon of Washington political reporters — Cokie Roberts, Sam Donaldson, George Will, Andrea Mitchell and many others whose heads appear daily on the screen — receive from $10-$30,000 (in Cokie's case) per appearance from industry groups like the National Association of Realtors, the American Hospital Association, the Public Relations Society of America and the Mortgage Bankers Association. The sensitivity of this issue was demonstrated last November, when ABC's Cokie Roberts, informed that her paid appearance in front of the Public Relations Society of America might include audience questions about her speaking fee, withdrew at the last minute (she was replaced by NBC's Andrea Mitchell).
Over the last 18 months, all three networks, in an effort to combat what ABC News Vice President Richard Wald termed "the appearance of conflict of interest," have imposed guidelines that prohibit their correspondents from taking speaking fees from profit-making enterprises or groups representing those they may report on.
But the real compromises lie deeper -- in corporate sponsorship that defines the very parameters of what is considered acceptable discourse. Take the pundit talk shows, where a parade of center-to-right-wing talking heads appear each week to engage in what passes as political debate. From "This Week with David Brinkley" to "The McLaughlin Group," two corporate sponsors predominate: General Electric and Archer Daniels Midland, two of the biggest corporate recipients of subsidies, tax breaks and government contracts in the country.
Is it really a surprise, given this fact, that these shows are more like political circuses than political debates? That histrionic posturing, featuring heat-filled disputations of political minutiae, fills the vacuum where genuine ideological discussion might otherwise exist? That television rarely challenges the abuses of corporate power? And that such progressive populists as Jim Hightower and Ralph Nader have routinely failed in their efforts to obtain backing for a political television show with a truly left-wing perspective?
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