That such "surprise" attacks, like Pearl Harbour, are being used to justify invasions of foreign countries shows how important it is for the news to be accurate. This raises the question of whose interests would be best served by biasing or manipulating the public news? The identifying of where those policies would be set, and how they could be enforced also becomes more than only academically interesting.

Thanks to some "leaked" and very frank CanWest directives sent to all their reporters, editors, and Station Managers across their national and international networks we now have the answers to some of those questions.

The instruction required that provision was to be made for at least two editorial items provided by the CanWest HQ Office to be reproduced "ver batum" every week, and then no item from any source was to be printed or broadcast which conflicted with the viewpoint of the those editorials.

Such a destruction of the integrity of reporters and correspondents evoked an immediate 24-hour protest strike. This drew a further memo from CanWest advising that there was no shortage of information sources, and so any who disliked working within company rules were welcome to leave at any time. So the next question is, now we know about enforcement, who and where sets those policies?

A university based study established that under corporate law, Management Boards have that authority, and then went on to list not only the people making the decisions on those Boards, BUT ALSO the Boards of other corporations on which they were doing the same thing. This shows that the ten top media companies operating in USA, which involves nearly all the major papers, plus radio and TV networks, there is an incestuous matrix via the Directors, interlocking with dominant parties in virtually all industrial sectors, particularly involving Finance, Politics, Oil, Consumer Goods Merchandising, and so on. Some examples of inter-corporate directorships are given in the
following extract from the Report summary.

(We Quote) From: "Janet M Eaton" [email protected] Big Media Interlocks with Corporate America

A research team at Sonoma State University has recently finished conducting a network analysis of the boards of directors of the ten big media organizations in the US. The team determined that only 118 people comprise the total membership on the boards of directors of the ten big media giants.

These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. In fact, eight out of ten big media giants share common memberships on boards of directors with shared interests. The following are but a few of the
corporate board interlocks for the big ten media giants in the US: (see list below)

A number of communication
mediums carry almost all the news and information on world affairs that most Americans receive. However, mainstream media no longer produce news for the mainstream population - nor should we consider the media as plural. Instead it is more accurate to speak of big media in the US today as the corporate media and to use the term in the singular tense-as it refers to the singular monolithic top-down power structure of self-interested news giants.

NBC and the Washington Post both have board members who sit on Coca Cola and J. P. Morgan, while the Tribune Company, The New York Times and Gannett all have members who share a seat on Pepsi.

It is kind of like one big happy family of interlocks and shared interests.

The following are but a "few" of the corporate board interlocks for the big ten media giants in the US:

* New York Times: Caryle Group, Eli Lilly, Ford, Johnson and Johnson, Hallmark, Lehman Brothers, Staples, Pepsi

* Washington Post: Lockheed Martin, Coca-Cola, Dun & Bradstreet, Gillette, G.E. Investments, J.P. Morgan, Moody's

* Knight-Ridder: Adobe Systems, Echelon, H&R Block, Kimberly-Clark, Starwood Hotels

* The Tribune (Chicago & LA Times): 3M, Allstate, Caterpillar, Conoco Phillips, Kraft, McDonalds, Pepsi, Quaker Oats, Shering Plough, Wells Fargo

* News Corp (Fox): British Airways, Rothschild Investments

* GE (NBC): Anheuser-Busch, Avon, Bechtel, Chevron/Texaco, Coca- Cola, Dell, GM, Home Depot, Kellogg, J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, Motorola, Procter & Gamble

* Disney (ABC): Boeing, Northwest Airlines, Clorox, Estee Lauder, FedEx, Gillette, Halliburton, Kmart, McKesson, Staples, Yahoo

* Viacom (CBS): American Express, Consolidated Edison, Oracle, Lafarge North America

* Gannett: AP, Lockheed-Martin, Continental Airlines, Goldman Sachs, Prudential, Target, Pepsi

* AOL-Time Warner (CNN): Citigroup, Estee Lauder, Colgate- Palmolive, Hilton.

Can we trust the news editors at the Washington Post to be fair and objective regarding news stories about Lockheed-Martin defence contract over-runs? Or can we assuredly believe that ABC will conduct critical investigative reporting on Halliburton's sole-source contracts in Iraq?

However if we believe - as increasingly more Americans do- that corporate media serves its own self-interests instead of those of the people, than we can no longer call it mainstream or refer to it as plural. Instead we need to say that corporate media is corporate America, and that the mainstream people need to be looking at alternative independent sources for our news and information.

Peter Phillips is a professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and director of Project Censored, a media research organization.

OUR COMMENTS: When we first heard from one of the few unmuzzled international correspondents the prediction that America is moving towards becoming a "corporate fascist dictatorship", we questioned the credibility of his assertion.

Subsequent events and this study, showing that a tiny coterie of "embedded".

directors, in number involving under one person in every 2 million, has control of, and can skew or filter the news information provided to nearly all American based networks, to suit the interests of Big Business, then we have no choice but to accept the prediction as a reasonable warning.

– from ELECTRONZ – 526, 1 August 2005