"Citizen Moon" It's A Good Idea To Know Your Sources Creative Loafing Column Issue Date 5/27/00 There's a great series of TV commercials running lately for one of those online brokerage firms, in which a day-trader, sitting alone at home at his computer, has sent out an email message to his contacts asking whether or not they had any good stock tips to pass on to him. He gets an immediate four-letter reply, something like "GEBS," which looks like a company's stock abbreviation. He gets excited, and sends back a breathless question: "Are you sure?" The next thing he knows, his screen fills up with "GEBS" repeated over and over and over, as if for emphasis. So he quickly buys a ton of "GEBS" stock. The next scene you see is that of a big business room, full of people partying, and having a good old time, including one especially heavy-set woman who's laughing hysterically at some joke, while bouncing up and down with her heavy derriere on her computer keyboard. What's she's doing is hitting the "GEBS" keys with her butt, and sending that back to the day trader. The commercial ends with this perilous message about making sure you know what you're doing: "Know Your Source," it says. It's a funny ad, but one worth paying attention to in areas ranging far beyond stock tips - including, especially these days, "The Media." In a time when corporations are buying up media outlets - TV, radio, Internet, publishing, etc. - at a dizzying pace, it might serve us all to "know our sources" more than we've ever found necessary. Take Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch, for example. Murdoch's a staunch conservative who owns, among other worldwide media outlets, the Fox Networks, TV and radio stations, and a publishing empire including supermarket tabloid rags. Murdoch launched the Fox News Network on cable a few years ago, because he thought CNN, owned by the decidedly liberal Ted Turner, slanted the news too much. He's also the guy who offered, through his publishing house, to pay Newt Gingrich a $3 Million guarantee to write a book, right after Newt became Speaker of the House of Representatives. We were supposed to believe, of course, that such an offer had nothing to do with the fact that Murdoch wanted a new law passed by Congress allowing him to dodge rules about how many media outlets any one person or company could own. Newt had to back off from accepting the guarantee, but he got paid plenty nonetheless, for a book that didn't sell squat. And Murdoch got his new laws. But Murdoch's not alone in buying media outlets, not simply for their investment purposes, but also because there's a political or religious agenda to disseminate. The latest bone-chilling example surfaced just last week: For the past four decades, every time the President of the United States held a press conference, a colorful character named Helen Thomas was there, usually in the front row, as the chief White House Correspondent for United Press International (UPI), a news delivery service that has long since passed its prime in favor of the Associated Press (AP) or Reuters International. As the dean of the press corps, she's been the one who always asked the first question of the President -- often feisty, but never rude -- and the one who ended the conference with a distinctive, "Thank you, Mr. President." But as of last week, Helen Thomas is gone, retired at the age of 79. She's not retiring because she's old. Although she's too gracious a woman to say so publicly, my guess is that she's resigning because of religion. I had the pleasure of meeting Helen a few years ago at Wingate University, when she was there to present a lecture. I can tell you that there aren't too many journalists left, unfortunately, with her sense of integrity, or her fierce independent streak. And that was made clear when she announced her resignation on the same day that UPI was purchased by a company called News World Communications. What is "News World Corp?" It's the same company that owns media outlets around the world, including the conservative Washington Times, which has become the alternative in D.C. to the Washington Post -- one of the country's most-distinguished papers, usually considered above reproach in its integrity, even if conservatives think otherwise. The Times - and now, UPI -- is owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the Korean leader of the cultish Unification Church, otherwise known as "Moonies." Moon considers himself the Messiah, the successor to Jesus Christ. And Moon has spent the past few decades taking money from unsuspecting, usually young, lost kids around the world, recruiting them, isolating them from their parents, their friends, and putting them to work on the streets of cities all over the world selling flowers or trinkets for change that goes right into Moon's pocket. He's now so rich that he can buy whatever he wants. And he can tell his media properties, either explicitly or in veiled tones, how he wants them to package "the news." Helen Thomas, I'll bet, had no intention of allowing her reputation and her credibility to be tainted by the likes of Rev. Moon. It's an incalculable loss to us all. I've been around newsrooms, in one form or another, most of my life, and I can tell you that times have changed - and not for the better. We may be inundated with options in which we can learn about our world at our leisure, from 24-hour cable channels to satellite delivery to our cell phones anyplace around the globe in an instant, but something's also being lost: an independent streak, and a commitment to integrity and responsibility. Despite the popular mythology, there didn't used to be a megalithic thing that we could call "The Media," run by a couple of big tycoons for their own purpose. Sure, Orson Wells could run up a red flag in the '30s with his thinly-veiled portrayal of media mogul William Randolph Hearst in "Citizen Kane," but for the most part, newspapers, TV and radio stations, were, until very recently, owned by a vast number of individuals, or small companies, committed to "journalism" in its highest sense. But those days are gone. Rev. Moon IS Citizen Kane. And so is Rupert Murdoch. AOL-Time Warner-CNN, Viacom-CBS, Disney-ABC, and a few others now control virtually everything we see, read or hear - and it's getting worse by the day. I don't have faith anymore that what I ingest is untainted - and I'm probably one of the last of you to succumb to this cynicism. I might not worry as much about the interests of purely profit-motivated capitalists who want to own everything as I do the Murdoch's and Moon's of the world - but I'm getting there fast. In the meantime, it might behoove all of us to remember the warnings of that poor guy who bought all that "GEBS" stock: Know Your Source. Otherwise, we might get left holding the bag.

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