'Big Business' Gets a Free Ride (10/11/95) By Jeff Cohen & Norman Solomon ''Big government'' has emerged as one of the most reviled villains of American political rhetoric. On Capitol Hill and the campaign trail -- and in routine media discourse -- the scourge of large government is self-evident and menacing. In contrast, we rarely hear warnings about ''big business.'' The fact that some giant companies keep expanding their size and power is accepted as beneficial at best, a mixed blessing at worst. The dangers of ''big business'' are apt to get short shrift. Why the wide gap in perceptions? For decades, news outlets have been hammering government -- from city halls, county boards and state legislatures to Congress and the White House. Under the glare of media spotlights, government can look awful -- with defects ranging from chronic inefficiency to notable corruption. Small wonder that many Americans are convinced the public sector is dysfunctional and perhaps downright evil. The private sector, however, generally eludes media scrutiny. Its activities are ordinarily assumed to require little accountability, much less approval, from the public. Although they can affect our lives as much as government actions do, major decisions by big-asset firms are usually relegated to the financial press or to the business sections of mainstream newspapers and magazines. Reporting tends to focus narrowly on prospects for corporate profits. Ironically, while we keep hearing that bloated entitlements for health care and Social Security are out of control, the ''big government'' tag is not applied to an agency that spends nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars each day. The Department of Defense seems to be immune from sustained media criticism for being too big or too expensive. Not coincidentally, the Pentagon is a cash-cow customer for many Fortune 500 companies. Some of them -- such as General Electric and Westinghouse -- have huge investments in media. Plenty more of them are high-spending advertisers, as well as moneyed contributors to politicians who selectively lambaste ''big government.'' On ''NBC Nightly News,'' anchor Tom Brokaw has presented ''The Fleecing of America'' -- a regular feature on ''how your government is wasting your money.'' Don't hold your breath for NBC (owned by GE) to do regular reports on ''how corporate America is ripping you off.'' Scandals in the private sector, like the S&L debacle, are often under-covered -- as taxpayers and consumers lose billions. Meanwhile, broadcast and print media fixate on relatively petty government scandals, like congressional check-bouncing. Even news accounts of polls skew our attention in one direction. Polling questions commonly measure disapproval of government waste, graft and deception -- but rarely touch on private-sector waste, fraud and abuse. For example, the private health insurance industry is one of the biggest -- and most costly -- bureaucracies in our country. Two years ago, the Associated Press conducted a poll with questions like, ''What percent of the federal budget do you realistically think could be cut as wasteful?'' But we don't often hear similar queries to gauge public discontent with big business, such as: ''Are corporate profits and CEO salaries excessive? What percentage do you think could be redirected toward employee wages, job training, safer working conditions or environmental protection?'' Reporters and editors do provide a valuable public service when they tenaciously dig behind facades of government virtue. Journalists should insist on ferreting out malfeasance among elected officials and their appointees. However, it's much less common for newsrooms to encourage journalists to go after powerful corporations with similar zeal. The hazards are many. Corporations can sue for libel. They can withdraw advertising -- and perhaps encourage other companies to do the same. And large corporate entities are run by people who tend to hobnob with media owners. ''The First Amendment rights belong to the owners,'' says Nicholas Johnson, a former member of the Federal Communications Commission. ''And the owners can exercise those rights by hiring people who will hire journalists who don't rock the boat, who don't attack advertisers, who don't challenge the establishment. That's a form of censorship.'' In truth, few ''successful'' reporters make a habit of tough reporting on corporations. For the most part, news media seem to be in denial about the importance of corporate power. Yet, we live in a time when corporate policies have enormous effects on our lives -- from the workplace and the marketplace to the economy and the environment. With news coverage casting aspersions on government agencies while letting corporations slide, it's easy for many politicians to denounce ''big government'' while winking at big business. -- Jeff Cohen is executive director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Norman Solomon is co-author of ''Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in the News Media.'' Goodbye Columbus Day: Time to End the Myth (10/4/95) By Jeff Cohen & Norman Solomon In a few weeks, many of us will slip on costumes and fantasy identities for Halloween. When Christmas nears, we'll perpetrate a fiction on our kids about Santa Claus. But this week, as the nation marks Columbus Day, maybe it's a good time to confront the mythology about the heroic explorer who ''discovered'' America. Journalism should help reveal facts and truths. Yet when it comes to Christopher Columbus, many mainstream pundits hold on dearly to myth. Columbus set sail in 1492 after convincing Spain's monarchy that gold and other riches were to be found in Asia. He ended up instead in the Americas: the Bahamas, then Cuba and Haiti. In the revealing log that Columbus kept during his voyage, he described how the friendly Arawak Indians first greeted his ships: ''They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They would make fine servants. With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.'' Columbus then embarked on a frenzied hunt for imaginary gold fields, using Indian captives: ''As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first island which I found, I took some natives by force'' as guides to ''whatever there is in these parts.'' After establishing a fort in what is now Haiti, Columbus returned to Spain -- with many Indian prisoners dying aboard ship -- to give a glowing report to the royalty in Madrid about what he'd found in the New World. Columbus described the Indians as ''so naive and so free with their possessions'' that ''when you ask for something they have, they never say no.'' His report ended with a plea for more support from the Spanish king and queen so he could return from his next voyage to the Indies with ''as much gold as they need... and as many slaves as they ask.'' Columbus' second expedition was granted 17 ships and 1,200 men in pursuit of gold (which was sparse) and potential slaves (who were plentiful). The result was a holocaust against the native population. In 1495, Indians were shipped to Spain as slaves, many dying en route. ''Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity,'' Columbus later wrote, ''go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.'' But far more Indians were enslaved in their homelands to harvest gold from bits of dust found in streams. Columbus' men ordered everyone over age 13 in a province of Haiti to bring in a quota of gold; Indians who failed had their hands cut off and were left to bleed to death. The war against the native population was so vicious -- including hangings, burnings and then mass suicides -- that historians estimate half of the Indians on Haiti (as many as 125,000 people) were dead within a few years. Today, media voices that boom the loudest in defense of Columbus are often the most ignorant. Rush Limbaugh, for example, once asserted that ''Columbus saved the Indians from themselves.'' History tells a different story. The most important document of the era is the multivolume ''History of the Indies'' by Bartolome de las Casas -- a Spanish priest involved in the conquest of Cuba, who owned a plantation employing Indian slaves. But Las Casas had a change of heart and began recording what he had witnessed. He described a cooperative Indian society in a bountiful land, a generally peaceful culture that occasionally went to war with other tribes. Yet there'd been no subjugation of the kind brought by Columbus. Writing in the early 1500s, Las Casas detailed how a whole people was basically worked to death: men in gold mines, women in the fields. Las Casas witnessed Spaniards -- driven by ''insatiable greed'' -- ''torturing the native peoples'' with ''the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty.'' The Spaniards ''thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades,'' wrote Las Casas. ''My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write.'' This bloody history might make modern readers tremble -- if they had access to it instead of just today's mythology. It's true that Columbus was a gifted navigator, personally brave and tenacious. But his enterprise -- as historian Howard Zinn documents in ''A People's History of the United States'' -- was infused with racism and greed. Holiday fantasies about jolly old Saint Nick may be harmless. But urging Americans to blithely celebrate Columbus every year is a denial of our past -- and an affront to our multicultural present. -- Jeff Cohen is executive director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Norman Solomon is co-author of ''Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in the News Media.'' Colin Powell: Don't Believe the Hype (9/6/95) By Jeff Cohen & Norman Solomon After years of glowing coverage and avid speculation about his political future, it's time for news media to start asking tough questions about Colin Powell. Release of the retired general's autobiography is set to tip over a huge row of PR dominos this fall. And with a Time cover story featuring book excerpts and network TV interviews kicking off a whirlwind 25-city tour, Powell's media star is likely to rise into the political heavens. Amid all the hoopla about the first black American to become a four-star Army general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the media spin presents Powell as a paragon of integrity and human values who could transform American politics in 1996. Declaring that Powell ''could win the presidency,'' Time magazine asked: ''But is he bold enough to go for the top job and take on the political establishment?'' An odd question -- since Powell's career was made possible by the political establishment. In fact, it's the establishment that would fund a Powell-for-president campaign. A ''former Pentagon official who now works in corporate America'' told Time: ''I could raise $ 50 million in one month just from the CEOs I know.'' News outlets have been slow to examine some aspects of Powell's record as a high-powered general. Here's a sampling: As a top deputy of Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Powell oversaw the Army's transfer of 4,508 TOW missiles to the CIA in January 1986. About 2,000 of those missiles became part of the arms-for-hostages swap with Iran -- a transaction that Powell helped to hide from Congress and the public. Soon after becoming President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser in 1987, Powell established himself as a point man for U.S. efforts to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. Traveling to the region in January 1988, Powell threatened a cutoff of U.S. aid to any Central American nation balking at continued warfare by Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua. He pushed for U.S. financing of the Contras and worked to sabotage the peace process initiated by Costa Rica's president, Oscar Arias. On December 20, 1989 -- three months after Powell became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- the United States invaded Panama, killing hundreds of civilians in the first hours. That day, Powell proclaimed: ''We have to put a shingle outside our door saying, 'Superpower lives here.' '' The Organization of American States voted 20 to 1 to criticize the invasion. But Powell -- who saw it as a great way to guard against Pentagon budget cuts -- ''emerged as the crucial figure in the decision to invade'' Panama, reported Martin Walker, a British newspaper correspondent covering Washington. ''Among his military peers,'' the reporter noted, Powell ''may yet go down as the man who saved the Pentagon's budget.'' Six months after the bloodletting in Panama boosted the U.S. military's stock at home, Powell delivered a speech charging that if Congress cut the Bush administration's proposed military budget of $ 303 billion, it would ''force us to start breaking the back of our armed forces.'' In 1992, Gen. Powell took the extraordinary step of publishing articles -- promoting his own views of foreign policy and appropriate military intervention -- in the New York Times and the Foreign Affairs quarterly. Later on in his stint as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell moved closer to insubordination. Defying the commander-in-chief in early 1993, Powell went public with fervent opposition to ending discrimination against gays in the military. Powell spread the word that he'd resign if President Clinton didn't back down on the issue. During the early 1990s, Powell became a military tail that often wagged the civilian dog. A former chief historian of the U.S. Air Force, Richard H. Kohn, calls Powell ''the most powerful military leader since George C. Marshall'' and ''the most political since Douglas MacArthur.'' Writing in the conservative journal the National Interest last year, Kohn concluded: ''It was under Colin Powell's tenure that civilian control eroded most since the rise of the military establishment in the 1940s and 1950s.'' When we interviewed him a few days ago, Kohn was emphatic: ''The trend in the last 25 years has been a weakening of civilian control of the military, and we've seen it most glaringly in the last 10 years.'' As the nation's highest-ranking military officer, Colin Powell played a central role in undermining civilian authority over the armed forces. Now, as he considers a run for the White House, journalists have a responsibility to scrutinize his record. -- Jeff Cohen is executive director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Norman Solomon is co-author of ''Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in the News Media.'' A collection of their columns, ''Through the Looking Glass: Bias and Blather in the News,'' was published recently.