Appendix A

“Who Owns the Media?”

Original Interchange episode aired 1998. Edited and aired on WFHB Rewind, April 30, 2025. Digitized from cassette.

INTRODUCTION (Kade Young): The segment is an abbreviated version of a 1998 episode of Interchange hosted by Shana Ritter and featuring guests Linda Billings, an instructor in journalism at Indiana University, and Sarah Rupel, a student in the Indiana University journalism program and the then-ombudsman of the Indiana Daily Student. The original episode was entitled "Who Owns the Media?" and was broadcast live during the 1998 spring fund drive and recorded to cassette.

Shana Ritter: If you're hearing sort of this strange little bit of an echo, we are broadcasting from a different studio this evening, because it is, as I said before, did I say it was fund drive week? And, of course, you can call and give your membership pledge at 323-1200 and WFHB is glad you're listening, and we're glad you're going to be calling really soon. Linda, can you tell me how you think the media has changed over the last 20 years?

Linda Billings: I know that one thing that we all want to talk about today, and I think we should talk about, especially during fund drive week, is who owns the media, how media ownership has changed, and I feel very, very good being a part of this show today, because I own a piece of this medium, of WFHB, our community radio station. I'm a member. I'm going to renew my membership this week, and I hope that people who are listening right now will call in during the show or later on, when it might be more convenient, and become a part of the ownership team, so to speak. Community radio is a rarity, I'm sorry to say.

The biggest change in the media industry over the past 20 years is in ownership. We have far fewer owners of the media, and those owners are becoming bigger and bigger and bigger.

Shana Ritter: You know, I also think about, I can't help but remember, sort of as a kid, the notion of the independent newspaperwoman or newsman, Lois Lane, as Sarah mentioned before, or the idea of reporter that would actually uncover a breaking story, as Watergate was uncovered by two reporters. Can that even happen anymore?

Linda Billings: It can, but it's very difficult to pay the rent. It's certainly possible to do this kind of work, but you have to spend more and more and more of your time on fundraising, just like WFHB has to spend a lot of time and energy on fundraising, and that leaves you less time to do your actual investigative reporting. So it's possible, but it's not easy.

Shana Ritter: You started alluding to it before, Linda, when you said that very, very few own the media and run it. Who owns the media?

Linda Billings: It's hard for me to keep track of at this point. I can't remember who's merged with whom. And we have major owners like Ted Turner, and we have the networks merging with the likes of the Disney Corporation, with Westinghouse. When you have mergers like ABC and Westinghouse, I think it is, there are concerns about Westinghouse's involvement in government contracting, especially in military contracts, doing a lot of sensitive work that the media traditionally have been and should be very interested in, and may be more prone to keep hands off of, because the company that owns the newspaper is the company that's doing this work that's highly controversial, that I think the public still wants to and needs to know about, but reporters may be urged, or even feel themselves more of an urge to back off.

Shana Ritter: How about the airwaves? What are you learning these days about this, Sarah?

Sarah Rupel: It's interesting that you mentioned that; just the other day in my media management class, we were talking about information on the web that... the professor, Randy Beam teaches that class, and he was asking us, say you're on the web, New York Times, and you're reading a book review. And at the bottom of a book review, it says, "Click here to order this book," you know, off of that site, Amazon.com. Does that influence the way maybe the reviewer writes that book review? I don't know. It seems kind of in that direction, that I think the writer becomes biased because, you know, they get paid the more hits they, that Amazon gets from people who've accessed the New York Times website. And I think we have to be very careful to make sure that even though advertisers are how the media gets most of its revenue, that the people we're indebted to are the public, and we owe them, you know, the honest truth, and, you know, without bias, and if it's gonna lose advertising money, what's more important, you know, giving the readers the truth, or, you know, getting that extra money? And I think it's keeping that relationship with the readers, you know, or the people who watch television, the people who listen to the radio.

Linda Billings: I'm not yet convinced that we who use the media prefer infotainment to old-fashioned news, shall we say, but the networks, the television networks, have decided that infotainment sells, and so we're getting more of it. We have rights. We have a right to communicate. We have a right to decide what we do and do not consume in the line of media. We have a right to decide whether or not we want to read the newspaper, whether or not we want to watch TV, whether or not we want to listen to the radio, and if we don't like what we hear, see, or read, we have a right to say so, and we have a right to say, I'm not going to watch that anymore. I'm not going to buy your paper anymore.

One really important change in the media over the past 20 years is the increasing role of advertising…

Shana Ritter: Is all of media an advertising mode at this point? I hate to say it so blatant, but...

Linda Billings: Well, in a dystopic vision of the future, I think that's what we're looking at. I honestly don't think that we all, the public, are going to let that happen, but we have to understand that we have rights. We make decisions about media use every day, and we have to remind ourselves to be conscious of how we're making those decisions. It's important to maintain diversity in media, diversity in types of media, diversity in media content, diversity in ownership of media, so that we can have ways of presenting, of finding these alternative points of view on important events in our own communities, in our national community and in the global community. We do need those alternative points of view, those different perspectives from people who just don't all see the world the same way.

Shana Ritter: If you want to see the airwaves, as Linda said, our airwaves being used for things that you believe in, you want your voice on the air at WFHB, show that you're part of our community and call us at 323-1200. You're not just a consumer on WFHB, you're a member of our community radio station. You've both talked a lot about us as takers-in of the media, as being consumers of the media, and that we have some power in deciding what the media does. How do we use that power? How do we let them know? How do we raise the consciousness that we are consumers of information and truth?

Linda Billings: I think free and independent news media is critical to the existence of democracy, and interestingly, we seem to understand that with regard to other countries, but I don't think we're thinking enough about what may be in the process of happening, or what could happen if the news media in this country is no longer free, how will that change the nature of our own democracy? So I think if we can simply raise our own consciousness and the consciousness of those in our communities, our friends and family, about our roles and not only our rights, but our responsibilities as citizens to participate. One way of participating, it may be a small way, but it's an important way, is to take some pride and ownership in your community radio station, for example.

Shana Ritter: Well done, Linda! That was very, very...

Linda Billings: Shana did not coach me to do that! The airwaves belong to the public. They are a natural resource. Television and radio need to get a government license to use the airwaves, to use the electromagnetic spectrum, simply, so, you know, when you tune in your radio or you push the button on your TV remote to get a certain channel, you know it's going to be there, so the signals aren't getting all confused. It's just a, sort of a technical thing that we have to deal with. But the airwaves, the electromagnetic spectrum belong to everyone. It's... we sometimes refer to this as the global commons.

Shana Ritter: “The global commons.” What a great phrase. Sarah, what do we do as citizens and as consumers of news, information, and entertainment, films? How do we influence what the media does?

Sarah Rupel: You can't just sit there and just wait for someone else to call in. You can't just sit there and wait for someone else to contact the media or to make a change. It just starts with that one little person, and it has a nice little rippling effect. And you know, everybody has a responsibility, because this goes back again to what Linda was saying. I mean, we own, you know, our communication, and it's up to us to show the media how we want them to communicate these things to us.