Reply #174: BTW - Kwitny was featured in "Fear and Favor in the Newsroom (1996)"

[MinM]

An excellent documentary about the issues in the news business (which are much worse today than a dozen years ago when this was produced) by Studs Terkel:

Fear and Favor in the Newsroom (1996)

Terkel: The Public Broadcasting System is supposed to be immune from corporate pressure, and PBS does occasionally air hard-hitting news programs. The half-hour weekly Kwitny Report, which first aired in 1988, was such a program. Produced by former Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitny, the show frequently exposed hidden skeletons in the closets of the powerful.

Kwitny: WETA in Washington and WNET in New York both welcomed us, invited us to come produce out of their studios, and would feed us to the system which wanted to broadcast us. The trick is that in order to do that, you have to pay them for those studios. They expect you to go out and raise the money, which means getting underwriting from corporations.

Nader: They are heavily based on local business donations, national corporate donations like AT&T and IBM, and also corporate foundations. And they have clipped their wings, and they’re as much subject to self-censorship as the commercial media.

Terkel: Shows such as this one, which examined the U.S. links to Guatemala’s dictatorship, did not endear The Kwitny Report to corporate sponsors.

Kwitny : Guatemala. Thirty-five years after we intervened in that then-peaceful and democratic country, human rights groups say Guatemala runs on state-sponsored murder, torture and pillage of property from the destitute millions. And just as American business had spearheaded the overthrow of Arbenz in 1954, it was deeply involved in the new repression.

Speaker : In all, there were more than a dozen American firms where workers attempting to organize unions were assassinated. At the Coca-Cola plant, more than a dozen workers were assassinated.

Kwitny: The public-affairs shows are funded by corporations who want certain views put forward. Take a guy like John McLaughlin — bear him no animosity — but what kind of reporting credentials? He was a kind of cantankerous editor of a conservative publication, the National Review. I don’t know of a single story he broke, or a reporting award he ever won. But the head of GE loved McLaughlin to such a degree that they gave him three — not one, which is all I ever wanted; not two; but three national television shows, because he was saying the kinds of things that the number two defense contractor and major corporation would like to have said on television. And they could spend out of their pockets as much as it took to put him on.

Terkel: After its second year, in which it won the prestigious Polk Award for investigative journalism, The Kwitny Report went off the air because it could not secure corporate funding...
http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2002/06/1502.shtml

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/story39.html

http://www.freespeech.org/videodb/index.php?action=detail&video_id=9830&browse=1