Communications - #18 Oct/Nov 95

SPIKE

THE RABID
MEDIA
WATCHDOG

C:\HYPE95.DOC

"It started about two weeks before the launch," according to one Microsoft employee. "The playing fields of the Microsoft campus were suddenly fenced off, filled with large cranes and machines, and given a 24-hour security detail. As the days went by it became more apparent that this was to be the site of the Windows '95 launch. The trucks and machinery gave way to circus tents of varying sizes and shapes. A ferris wheel was brought in. Golf carts shuttled coordinators and VIPs to and fro."

In the end, Microsoft employees were barred from the on-campus extravaganza that was broadcast around the world via satellite. They too watched it on TV in crowded cafeterias.

As no doubt intended, the marketing hype around Windows '95 became the message. Microsoft spent enormous sums of money on worldwide promotion of its August 24 release date: buying the Rolling Stone's "Start Me Up," the lighting of the Empire State Building, a giant Win '95 box floating in Sydney Harbor, and most objectionably, the unprecedented purchase of a day's entire run of the London Times. Journalistic integrity is suspect enough with overflow corporate advertising; allowing Microsoft to use the paper as an advertising circular only illustrates the point more blatantly.

Here in Microsoft's frontyard, Bill Gates didn't need to buy a newspaper; The Seattle Times and P.I. were given freely. In the two weeks up to and including the release date, The Seattle Times ran eight cover stories on Microsoft, Bill Gates or Windows '95. Most included photos. During the same period, articles appeared on the front page of another section 12 times. Several of these were full-page spreads. Topics included reviews of the product, speculation surrounding the Justice Department's kid-glove handling of the Microsoft anti-trust case, Microsoft's rumored bid for CBS, and the laudatory @20/40 series (Microsoft at 20, Bill Gates at 40 years old.) The P.I. and local TV news programs gave just as generously. At least the London Times billed Microsoft for the hype.

Shortly after the release, The Seattle Times (which handles advertising for both itself and the P.I.) refused a $13,000 ad for CompuServe criticizing the Microsoft Network (MSN) and Windows '95 built-in access to the new on-line service. CompuServe is the nation's oldest commercial online service provider. The official reason for declining the ad was a policy of denying ads to all online services on the theory that they compete with print newspapers. However, the Times is reportedly negotiating with Microsoft to put the paper on MSN.

Rumors that Microsoft offered to sponsor this issue of the WFP in exchange for online rights are unsubstantiated but we're open to offers.

-Andy Bauck

The Free Press

Navel Gaze

Consider the Free Press as a media experiment: Some out of work journalists and fellow travellers put together a paper without money or an office. They rake a little muck, tackle corporate giants, and even win awards. Weekly papers from around the country have reprinted the occasional story from the Free Press. But what does mainstream media pick up from yours truly? Here's the answer based on a Lexis/Nexis search:

In a nearly unfathomable column, Spencer Katt of PC Week mocked Matt Robesch's story in Issue 10 ("Microsoft and the Stream With No Name") on how construction of the Microsoft campus in Redmond has altered and clouded the waters of the nearby Lil' Bit O'Heaven trout farm. ("'Trout a la Bill? No, I've eaten,' sniffed the Katt.")

For a good stretch of 1994, the Free Press made a regular appearance in Seattle Times reporter Ferdinand M. de Leon's "Time & Again" column on Sundays. Our humor pieces, such as John Ambrosavage's "Little List of Sayings" or our condom reviews of past, seemed to get good play.

But the winner is Free Press writer Mike Blain. His new lexicon to replace the vagueness of the word "vegetarian" in Issue 7 was picked up by Health magazine. As a consequence, Mike's "Are you a semi-spamivore?" got write-ups in the Austin American-Statesman, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Arizona Republic, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Vancouver Sun and so on . . .

But let's be serious. Most of our stories need not apply for mainstream media mention. Never mind Mike's investigative story on environmentally devastating and illegal timber cutting practices on private lands (Issue 9). Our expose of chemical exposure at Boeing (Issue 8) won a national award but nary a mention in mainstream or alternative media. More recently, Doug Collins investigated how Nordstrom has hijacked the HUD block-grant process so rich people can have more convienent parking and shopping at the Frederick & Nelson building in downtown Seattle (Issue 16). Despite positive reader reaction, these stories registered no blips on the mainstream media screen.

The point here is political economy, not sour grapes. Humor and light fare travels far in the news business, but corporate media shuns reporting that casts a bad light on money and power.

From the Freedom of the (Free) Press File

A quick background check on the Free Press also yielded this tidbit: The first Washington Free Press was an underground screed published in the nation's capital in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1973, the F.B.I. acknowledged that in 1969 it had entered the paper's offices without a search warrant, but hastened to deny that it was an "illegal break-in." Sources told the New York Times that the F.B.I. and Army were searching for evidence of the paper's Communist influence and financing. However, all they found was garbage. Turns out the building manager provided the G-men with keys to the offices one week after evicting the paper for not paying rent.

Also in 1969, anti-war activist J. Brinton Dillingham was sentenced to six months in jail for selling a copy of the Washington Free Press to an undercover cop in Montgomery County, Md. That issue contained a cartoon depicting a county judge in the nude. Dillingham's conviction for distributing "obscene" material was later reversed. (Sadly, Dillingham - a well-known D.C.-area activist - died of leukemia in 1990.)

Decoding Bias and Blather

For a trenchent analysis of the media biz, check out the new collection of columns by media critics Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon. Their new book, Through the Media Looking Glass: Decoding Bias and Blather in the News, helps cut through the wave of crap that passes for "news" in the corporate-owned TV and print media.

With a foreword by Texas populist Jim Hightower, the collection is replete with analyses of media mergers, "big money," foreign policy coverage, environmental coverage, and a detailed no-holds-barred indictment of slanted labor and strike coverage.

The book is also good fun. It includes the 1993 and 1994 "P.U.-litzer Prizes" for the "foulest media performances." Winners include P.B.S. (censorship award for failing to run "The Panama Deception," and "Deadly Deception," a documentary about G.E.'s nuke trade) and Rupert Murdoch ("media hypocrite of the year" for gutting mentions of human rights in his Star TV transmissions into China.)

Published by Common Courage Press. $11.95 paper. Call (800) 253-3605 to order.

Bias Watch

Laboring for a New Media Foundation

You'd think no one has to work anymore given the current lack of local media attention to basic workplace issues. And certainly you'd think unions had become virtually extinct given the way union news is buried under a flood of corporate and financial coverage on the business page.

The Washington State Labor Council (WSLC), the umbrella organization for all AFL-CIO unions in the state, is aiming to change all that. A "Foundation for Working Families" is in the works in response to a call during the 1994 WSLC Convention to "raise funding for media education, advertising, and underwriting projects to increase the level of awareness about workers and their unions within the general public and also to help create a better informed workplace."

If sufficient funds can be garnered from individual unions, the Foundation will be announced early next year, and will begin buying time on all forms of media by the winter of '96.

Declining wages, corporate "downsizing" designed to please Wall Street speculators, and the devastating effects of minimally-regulated free trade are all wreaking havoc on the lives of average workers (as opposed to "Microsoft millionaires"). At the same time, workers, unions, and union federations are showing signs of reawakening after decades of slumber, with new organizing campaigns, intensified political action, and more community outreach in the works. The WSLC Foundation for Working Families is designed to help ensure that you hear both about these economic problems, and the role of unions in their solution.

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Contents on this page were published in the October/November, 1995 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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