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 something 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 narrowcasting 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.
Contact: 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 [email protected].