Content & Context

By Nathan Bierma

Content & Context

The Books & Culture Weblog

May 2003

This Week:

The quietest scandal
Dialogue: media diversity and democracy
Places & Culture
Weekly Digest

A DIFFERENT KIND OF 'DEATH OF OUTRAGE'

Every time I hear someone complain how much sports stars are paid, I always wonder why our society fixates on this molehill and misses the mountain. For that matter, when it comes to moral outrage over social issues, there's one whopper that dwarfs the cases that make the headlines, from Bill Clinton's adultery to Bill Bennett's gambling.

The 600-pound elephant in the room—or should we say the $82-million elephant in the room—begging for more of our ire is the scandal of CEO salaries.

A recent rash of stories in the mainstream media tried to shove this onto our outrage-thirsty culture's front burner in the wake of Enron and other corporate Hindenburgs (and yes, most of these stories were written by people whose paychecks are signed by well-paid CEO's). Fortune, Business Week, Slate, the London Guardian, along with the reliably plucky Sojourners, have all run stories (linked below) calling attention to a certain side effect of capitalism.

How crazy is it? In 1960, the average CEO's salary exceeded the average employee's wage by a factor of 12, according to CBSMarketWatch.com.

Now it's by a factor 531. No, that isn't a misprint. Once again: the average CEO's salary is 531 times larger than the average employee's.

Who knows how they come up with these statistics, but the point carries through—the natural economic rhythms of our society are facilitating greed in an alarming way. And we're complaining about outfielders?

Now you can extol the virtues of a free market system versus a state-run economy. You can even try to argue that the achievements of CEOs are due primarily to their industriousness as much as their luck in being born into the middle or upper class and massaging their connections in the financial world to elevate them to such staggering heights. If you want to be insensitive, you can argue, as did a Forbes article called "In Praise of Inequality," that inequality is a necessary motivating mechanism in our economy (see second item here for a rebuttal).

But you can't say that CEOs work harder today than 40 years ago by a ratio of 531 to 12—that they're that much better at what they do or that it's that much harder to find a good one to run your company.

It shatters the notion of earning a salary. And lest any doubts remain about the irrelevance of merit, see the Fortune cover story from last month entitled "Have They No Shame?" It was subtitled, "Their performance stank last year, yet most CEOs got paid more than ever." The story begins by reporting that Tyco executive Dennis Kozlowski made $82 million last year, a generous reward for his company's stock sliding 71% after a crippling federal indictment. Kozlowski's former CFO made even more; the two were the highest-paid executives of an S&P 500 company last year, according to Fortune.

At least 12 others made tens of millions while their companies performed poorly. Meanwhile, hard workers across the nation fret over how to make ends meet. Millions more don't have health insurance. These are the vices of an otherwise virtuous economic system.

The recent spurt of media coverage of CEO salaries provides some perspective to the media's own constant reports of how bad the economy is, which tend to reflexively blame world events or insufficiently-spending shoppers (see 3/10 weblog on defining "weak economy"). But it doesn't figure to catch on. Compared to other moral outrages, the issue of CEO salaries just isn't that dramatic. A president's disgraces in the Oval Office, the latest drive-by shooting or nightclub fire, the latest ten-figure contract for a sports star while teachers and nurses are paid a relative pittance—now those are outrages you can hang your hat on. (At least Shaquille O'Neal's salary has some relationship to how much fans will pay to see him. No one was buying Enron shares to bask in the glory of Ken Lay. See this column of mine on sports salaries.)

We should avoid the quasi-Marxist rhetoric of the Left, which too often serves as insincere populism, merely a surefire fundraising punch line. But Christian discipleship means sensible stewardship, and lamenting the absence of same, across all of creation. Other than certain commonsense changes (such as more internal promoting and less superstar-chasing of executives, and more boardrooms willing to stand up to their bosses at budget time), there is little to allay our feeling of powerlessness. Liberals long for more government regulations, but fighting corporations with bureaucracy can be like trying stab a grape with a spoon. Conservatives push for greater public regard of traditional moral teachings, but Lay and other corporate culprits seemed to have had the right upbringing. Sometimes discipleship means settling in for a long period of lamenting social injustice until Christ returns.

Related articles:

DIALOGUE

Next month, the FCC is expected to ease its regulations on how many media outlets a corporation can own in the same city. It will be a troubling encore to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which, among other things, enabled Clear Channel to expand its holdings from a few dozen radio stations to over 1,000, lowering the diversity, spontaneity, and local relevance of many of those stations. Robert McChesney, professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is the author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy and co-author of Our Media, Not Theirs, which argue that deregulating the media harms democracy.

Books & Culture: Doesn't a media company's profitability reflect public taste as well as public policy?

Robert McChesney: The two go hand in hand. The argument that's generally given is that market competition forces companies to give people what they want, so whether you like these companies or not, they're not insidious forces, they're basically responding to the marketplace and giving people what they want. So if you're upset with the content of current media, don't blame the companies, they're just trying to satisfy the public—that's where the problem lies.

There's an element of truth to this argument in the sense that the people who own NBC and CBS are trying to put on TV shows that people are going to watch, they're not going to put on a show that no one wants to see. But they're not necessarily giving people what they want …

Markets not always an accurate description of values; they don't always reflect what people think, and they're much more complex mechanisms. If you're exposed to something for a long time you develop a taste for it; if you never have exposure to it, you [don't]. Sometimes as a citizen I might want there to be stuff that I wouldn't necessarily take a personal interest in, but I understand it's a vital part of society. I don't listen to a lot of classical music but I'm in favor of subsidizing classical music and operas and all that; I think it's an important part of our cultural heritage … So markets aren't the only way we express our interests; market values can't be the only way to gauge the culture.

Also, markets are not democratic; they're not based on one person, one vote; they're one dollar, one vote. So if you have a market-driven media system it's going to be heavily skewed toward those who have the most money. In the 1950s there were hundreds of full-time labor reporters. Today, the position has been virtually eliminated; there's about ten. But business journalism has mushroomed; it's almost surpassed traditional journalism in resources. That's because of purely market-driven reasons. It's profitable to do journalism aimed at the upper-middle class, it's not profitable to do journalism aimed at working-class people. That's not good for a democratic republic. So the market is not an infallible determinant.

B&C: Many of the current regulations on media ownership were made in a different era of media, before media companies faced competition from cable, DVDs, and the Internet. Thus the companies and their lobbyists are arguing that they need relaxed regulations in order to compete. How do you receive these claims that current policies put companies in financial jeopardy?

McChesney: It's self-serving and it's absurd. If these companies genuinely can't make money, they can give up their [broadcasting] licenses. No one's forcing them to take these monopoly licenses. If a company says, "If we aren't allowed to own a daily newspaper and 10 radio stations [in the same town], we just can't make money," then get rid of the licenses. If no one wants to take these licenses, then we've got a strong problem, but I've got a strong feeling we're going to find people who really want to take those licenses in the terms that currently exist. The problem is that [the American] people were never allowed to set these terms to these public properties. The terms should be set to suit the needs of people of this country.

B&C: The mainstream media's coverage of accounting fraud at Enron and WorldCom made those companies front page stories and late-night TV punch lines. Is this inconsistent with your view that corporate media is soft on corporations?

McChesney: It's preposterous to use Enron as an example of how well the [media] system works. Enron for six years in a row was voted the top company by Fortune, from 1995 to 2000. We know now that for six years this stuff was going on. Ralph Nader was saying this was going on, it never made it into our filters. WorldCom was being saluted in our news media as a genius company. Journalism completely dropped the ball in corporate scandals. There is not enough critical analysis of role of business in our society, in its influence over our lives, the relationship of business to government and public policy making. Instead it's rah-rah, how great capitalism is. It's press release journalism with little critical edge. Because of that, these sleazeball antics went uncovered for so long. It took bankruptcy scandals to get noticed.

• Roundup of this weekend's news coverage of media deregulation (fourth item here)

• Previous Dialogue: Corporations and sports

PLACES & CULTURE

From the Washington Post:

NEW DELHI — Rajesh Rajora, a wrought-iron worker, lives in a sprawling illegal settlement with no municipal water service. So a couple of years ago, he got together with his neighbors to dig a well, which now serves about 50 homes on a network of makeshift pipes. Each gets about 15 minutes of running water per day. But how much longer is anyone's guess. Literally thousands of such unauthorized wells have been sunk in New Delhi, causing groundwater levels to drop alarmingly low. Many wells have already gone dry … But a solution may be in sight. It is called "rainwater harvesting," an elegantly simple practice — rooted in the traditions of ancient India — that involves collecting monsoon rains and piping them underground to recharge depleted aquifers. The inexpensive conservation technique has been successfully applied in five pilot projects here.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42725-2003Apr26.html

NEW YORK, April 20 — In a park next to the stately New York Public Library, a hawk named Starbuck swoops down from a tree. Frightened pigeons scatter in all directions. On this blustery morning, Starbuck is hard at work in a pilot program to drive a growing number of pigeons out of Bryant Park, where about 5,000 people spend their lunch hours each day. "New Yorkers used to complain about muggers and drug dealers here. Now they're complaining about pigeon droppings on their business suits," said Daniel Biederman, executive director of the Bryant Park Restoration Corp., a private, nonprofit organization that helps maintain the 19th-century park. Falconer Thomas Cullen, 51, was hired to let his trained Harris hawks scare pigeons out of the eight-acre patch of landscaped greenery … If the hundreds of pigeons at Bryant Park start to find greener pastures — a trend already noted after just a few days — the program will continue at the park through the warm-weather months with five hawks, plus a falcon.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64709-2003Apr20.html

DIGEST

For links with an * you can log in with member name and password of "bcread"

• "Americans today have little interest in running the world, except by remote control," writes Forbes' Mark Lewis in Slate. "But that may be because we've already learned our lesson." Lewis' great-grandfather was among the first wave of American troops to occupy Manila back in 1898, when Congress annexed the Philippines. He didn't stay long, but the United States did, setting the stage for a mostly-forgotten story that intertwines would-be president William Howard Taft, Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, Douglas MacArthur, and the end of America's appetite for imperialism. The story is worth revisiting, Lewis says, in a year when, in the name of squelching terror, we've sent troops to Iraq—and to the Phillipines.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2082396

• "The brothers are very into epic poetry and philosophy—into Schopenhauer and William James," says Princeton's Cornel West of Matrix makers Larry and Andy Wachowski. The two are such fans of West that they wrote him a role for The Matrix Reloaded, the first of two sequels this year to their 1999 brain-bending hit. The franchise is, in the words of star Laurence Fishburne, "a combination of science fiction, Hong Kong kung fu, cyberpunk and classic American action, with heavy doses of spiritualism and philosophy." Not to give anything way, but the slow-paced first half of Reloaded, which opens Friday, may not grip action fans, while the trigger-happy second half may lack the metaphysical depths that please the philosophiles. This is according to Richard Corliss in Time, in a review that reads like a press release for the magazine's corporate sibling and Matrix production company, Warner Bros.

http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101030512/story.html

•How do you teach poetry to the Game Boy generation? Harvard junior fellow Maureen McLane, writing in the Boston Review, reflects on the limits and successes of her efforts to introduce Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes to students in the East Harlem Poetry Project, pondering the nature and purpose of self-expression.

http://bostonreview.net/BR28.2/mclane.nclk

From last week's weblog:

Is poetry dead? (second item here)

An unprecedented asthma testing program in Harlem (second item here)

• Oscar Wilde fretted over his legacy and gorged himself on the American lecture circuit to stave off misunderstanding (or just to defy obscurity). Imagine how he would squirm at the distortions of his biographers, writes Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Atlantic Monthly. "Attempts to appropriate or reinvent Wilde come in various shades of green, red, and pink: Wilde the Irish rebel, Wilde the subversive socialist, Wilde the gay martyr," Wheatcroft writes. "All these have been most assiduously promoted by intelligent writers; none looks any more convincing after a close reading of the Letters and his works."

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/05/wheatcroft.htm

• The case for elitism: Hold high standards for art and thought and you risk being called a snob, or even anti-democratic. But the "charge of elitism is the last (and, sometimes, first) resort of the aesthetic scoundrel," writes classical music critic Sarah Bryan Miller in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Our culture's Cold-War-era distrust of authority, Miller says, translated to a complete mistrust of experts, and our fetish for populism makes standards of aesthetic quality politically incorrect. Miller suggests that the worst crime is not having low standards, but not being able to articulate what your standards are. Which is ironic, because her piece neglects the questions of what her own standards are, as well as what the difference is between "taste" and "quality," and why are supposedly expert-averse culture worships prophets such as Martha Stewart and Dr. Phil for their perceived wisdom.

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/entertainment/columns.nsf …

• The Nigerian e-mail scam began with letters in the 1980s, then faxes. But the Internet is spreading it like a virus. The U.S. government received 326,000 reports of such e-mails last year, up from 33,000 the year before. Its tally of $24 million in victims' losses is surely low, since it's an embarrassing thing to report. But what would happen if, for the sake of informing the public, you replied "Sure! Tell me More!" to every Nigerian offer that hits your inbox? Diane Brady set out to call scammers' bluff for Business Week online.

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/apr2003 …

• Browsing: A pedestrian profile of Bill Frist in The New York Times Magazine;

Newsweek on the rise of male homemakers, and more from Slate's "In Other Magazines."

http://slate.msn.com/id/2082542

Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant at Books & Culture.

By Nathan Bierma

Content & Context

This Week:

A DIFFERENT KIND OF 'DEATH OF OUTRAGE'

DIALOGUE

PLACES & CULTURE

DIGEST

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November/December 2016