Jews and the Media: Shaping Ways of Seeing

Jews and the Media:
Shaping Ways of Seeing
By Kevin McDonald, California State University

By all accounts, ethnic Jews have a powerful influence in the American media far larger than any other identifiable group. The extent of Jewish ownership and influence on the popular media in the United States is remarkable given the relatively small proportion of the population that is Jewish.²⁸ In a survey performed in the 1980s, 60 percent of are presentative sample of the movie elite were of Jewish background (Powers et al. 1996, 79n13). Michael Medved (1996, 37) notes that it makes no sense at all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular culture. Any list of the most influential production executives at each of the major movie studios will produce a heavy majority of recognizably Jewish names. This prominent Jewish role is obvious to anyone who follows news reports from Tinsel Town or even bothers to read the credits on major movies or television shows.

Media ownership is always in flux, but the following is a reasonably accurate portrait of current media ownership in the United States by ethnic Jews:

The largest media company in the world was recently formed by the merger of America On Line and Time Warner. Gerald M. Levin, formerly the head of Time Warner, is the Chief Executive Officer of the new corporation. AOL-Time Warner has holdings in television (e.g., Home Box Office, CNN, Turner Broadcasting), music (Warner Music), movies (Warner Brothers Studio, Castle Rock Entertainment, and New Line Cinema), and publishing (Time, Sports Illustrated, People, Fortune).

The second largest media company is the Walt Disney Company, headed by Michael Eisner. Disney has holdings in movies (Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group, under Walt Disney Studios, includes Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Caravan Pictures, Miramax Films); television (Capital Cities/ABC [owner of the ABC television network], Walt Disney Television, Touchstone Television, Buena Vista Television, ESPN, Lifetime, A&E Television networks) and cable networks with more than 100 million subscribers; radio (ABC Radio Network with over 3,400 affiliates and ownership of 26 stations in major cities); publishing (seven daily newspapers, Fairchild Publications [Women’s Wear Daily], and the Diversified Publishing Group).

The third largest media company is Viacom, Inc., headed by Sumner Redstone, who is also Jewish. Viacom has holdings in movies (Paramount Pictures); broadcasting (the CBS TV network; MTV [a particular focus of criticism by cultural conservatives], VH-1, Nickelodeon, Showtime, the National Network, Black Entertainment Television, 13 television stations; programming for the three television networks); publishing (Simon & Schuster, Scribner, The Free Press, and Pocket Books), video rentals (Blockbuster); it is also involved in satellite broadcasting, theme parks, and video games.

Another major media player is Edgar Bronfman, Jr., the son of Edgar Bronfman, Sr., president of the World Jewish Congress and heir to the Seagram distillery fortune. Until its merger with Vivendi, a FrenchCompany, in December 2000, Bronfman headed Universal Studios, a major movie production company, and the Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music company (including Polygram, Interscope Records, Island/Def Jam, Motown, Geffen/DGC Records). After the merger, Bronfman became the Executive Vice-Chairman of the new company, Vivendi Universal, and the Bronfman family and related entities became the largest shareholders in the company.²⁹ Edgar Bronfman, Sr. is on the Board of Directors of the new company.

Other major television companies owned by Jews include New World Entertainment (owned by Ronald Perelman who also owns Revlon cosmetics),and DreamWorks SKG (owned by film director Steven Spielberg, former Disney Pictures chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, and recording industry mogul David Geffen). DreamWorks SKG produces movies, animated films, television programs, and recorded music. Spielberg is also a Jewish ethnic activist. After making Schindler’s List, Spielberg established Survivors of the Shoah Foundation with the aid of a grant from the U.S. Congress. He also helped fund Professor Deborah Lipstadt’s defense against a libel suit brought by British military historian and Holocaust revisionist David Irving.

In the world of print media, the Newhouse media empire owns 26 daily newspapers, including several large and important ones, such as the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Newark Star-Ledger, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune; Newhouse Broadcasting, consisting of 12 television broadcasting stations and 87 cable-TV systems, including some of the country’s largest cable networks; the Sunday supplement Parade, with a circulation of more than 22 million copies per week; some two dozen major magazines, including the New Yorker, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Bride’s, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, Self, House & Garden, and all the other magazines of the wholly owned Conde Nast group.

The newsmagazine, U.S. News & World Report, with a weekly circulation of 2.3 million, is owned and published by Mortimer B. Zuckerman. Zuckerman also owns New York’s tabloid newspaper, the Daily News, the sixth-largest paper in the country, and is the former owner of the Atlantic Monthly. Zuckerman is a Jewish ethnic activist. Recently he was named head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an umbrella organization for major Jewish organizations in the U.S.³⁰ Zuckerman’s column in U.S. News and World Report regularly defends Israel and has helped to rejuvenate the America-Israeli Friendship League, of which he is president.³¹

Another Jewish activist with a prominent position in the U.S. media is Martin Peretz, owner of The New Republic (TNR) since 1974. Throughout his career Peretz has been devoted to Jewish causes, particularly Israel. During the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, he told Henry Kissinger that his dovishness stopped at the delicatessen door, and many among his staff feared that all issues would be decided on the basis of what was good for the Jews (Alterman 1992, 185, 186). Indeed, one editor was instructed to obtain material from the Israeli embassy for use in TNR editorials. It is not enough to say that TNR’s owner is merely obsessed with Israel; he says so himself. But more importantly, Peretz is obsessed with Israel’s critics, Israel’s would-be critics, and people who never heard of Israel, but might one day know someone who might someday become a critic (Alterman 1992, 195).

The Wall Street Journal is the largest-circulation daily newspaper in the U.S. It is owned by Dow Jones & Company, Inc., a New York corporation that also publishes 24 other daily newspapers and the weekly financial paper Barron’s. The chairman and CEO of Dow Jones is Peter R. Kann. Kann also holds the posts of chairman and publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

The Sulzberger family owns the New York Times Co., which owns 33 other newspapers, including the Boston Globe. It also owns twelve magazines (including McCall’s and Family Circle, each with a circulation of more than 5 million), seven radio and TV broadcasting stations; a cable-TV system; and three book publishing companies. The New York Times News Service transmits news stories, features, and photographs from the New York Times by wire to 506 other newspapers, news agencies, and magazines.

Jewish ownership of the New York Times is particularly interesting because it has been the most influential newspaper in the U.S. since the start of the 20th century. As noted in a recent book on the Sulzberger family (Tifft & Jones 1999), even at that time, there were several Jewish-owned newspapers, including the New York World (controlled by Joseph Pulitzer), the Chicago Times-Herald and Evening Post (controlled by H. H. Kohlsaat), and the New York Post (controlled by the family of Jacob Schiff). In 1896 Adolph Ochs purchased the New York Times with the critical backing of several Jewish businessmen, including Isidor Straus (co-owner of Macy’s department stores) and Jacob Schiff (a successful investment banker who was also a Jewish ethnic activist). Schiff and other prominent Jews like . . . Straus had made it clear they wanted Adolph to succeed because they believed he could be of great service tothe Jews generally’ (Tifft & Jones 1999, 37–38). Ochs’s father-in-law was the influential Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, president of the AJ Congress and the World Jewish Congress and the founder of Reform Judaism in the United States.

There are some exceptions to this pattern of media ownership, but even in such cases ethnic Jews have a major managerial role.³² For example, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation owns Fox Television Network, 20th Century Fox Films, Fox 2000, and the New York Post. However, Peter Chernin is president and CEO of Fox Group, which includes all of News Corporation’s film, television, and publishing operations in the United States. Murdoch is deeply philosemitic and deeply committed to Israel, at least partly from a close relationship he developed early in his career with Leonard Goldenson, who founded the American Broadcasting Company. (Goldenson was a major figure in New York’s Jewish establishment and an outspoken supporter of Israel.) Murdoch’s publications have taken a strongly pro-Israel line, including The Weekly Standard, the premier neo-conservative magazine, edited by William Kristol.

Murdoch . . . as publisher and editor-in-chief of the New York Post, had a large Jewish constituency, as he did to a lesser degree with New York magazine and The Village Voice. Not only had the pre-Murdoch Post readership been heavily Jewish, so, too, were the present Post advertisers. Most of Murdoch’s closest friends and business advisers were wealthy, influential New York Jews intensely active in pro-Israel causes. And he himself still retained a strong independent sympathy for Israel, a personal identification with the Jewish state that went back to his Oxford days. (Kiernan 1986, 261)

Murdoch also developed close relationships with several other prominent Jewish figures in the New York establishment, including attorney Howard Squadron, who was president of the AJ Congress and head of the Council of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, and investment banker Stanley Schuman.

Another exception is NBC which is owned by General Electric. However, the President of NBC is Andrew Lack and the President of NBC News is Neal Shapiro, both of whom are Jewish. In addition, the Bertelsmann publishing group is a Germany-based company that is the largest publisher of trade books in the world and also owns magazines, newspapers, and music. Most of Bertelsmann’s influence is outside the United States, although it recently purchased the Random House Publishing Company.

Even granting the exceptions, it is clear that Jews enjoy a very powerful position in U.S. media, a position that is far more powerful than any other racial/ethnic group. The phenomenal concentration of media power in Jewish hands becomes all the more extraordinary when one notes that Jews constitute approximately 2.5% of the U.S. population. If the Jewish percentage of the American media elite is estimated at 59% (Lichter et al. 1983, 55)—probably an underestimate at the present time, the degree of disproportionate representation may be calculated as greater than 2000%. The likelihood that such an extraordinary disparity could arise by chance is virtually nil.

[end of article]

A tale of two stories

In most of the world, it is the Palestinian narrative of a dispossessed people that dominates. In the United States, however, the narrative that dominates is Israel's: a democracy under constant siege. Europeans and other Palestinian partisans point to the fact that the Israel lobby in America is one of the strongest anywhere, and Jewish individuals and organizations give millions of dollars to political candidates in order to reward pro-Israel policies and punish those who support the Palestinians. Another reason, however, is the near-complete domination by pro-Israel partisans of the punditocracy discourse. Some Jewish groups in America like to harass news organizations like The Washington Post or National Public Radio for what they believe to be coverage insufficiently sympathetic to Israel's plight. But even Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu would not be able to complain about the level of support their actions typically receive from the members of the punditocracy.

For reasons of religion, politics, history and genuine conviction the punditocracy debate of the Middle East in America is dominated by people who cannot imagine criticizing Israel. The value of this legion to the Jewish state is, literally incalculable, particularly when push - as it inevitably does in the Middle East - comes to shove. Here's a list made in trying to measure the immeasurable.

COLUMNISTS AND COMMENTATORS WHO CAN BE COUNTED UPON TO SUPPORT ISRAEL REFLEXIVELY AND WITHOUT QUALIFICATION:

William Safire, The New York Times

A.M. Rosenthal, The New York Daily News, formerly Executive Editor of and later columnist for, The New York Times,

Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, PBS, Time, and The Weekly Standard, formerly of the New Republic. Michael Kelly, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, National Journal, and MSNBC.com, formerly of The New Republic and The New Yorker.

Lally Weymouth, The Washington Post and Newsweek

George Will, The Washington Post, Newsweek and ABC News

Martin Peretz, The New Republic,

Daniel Pipes, The New York Post

Andrea Peyser, The New York Post

Dick Morris, The New York Post

Lawrence Kaplan, The New Republic

William Bennett, CNN

William Kristol, The Washington Post, the Weekly Standard, Fox News, formerly of ABC News

Robert Kagan, The Washington Post and The Weekly Standard,

Mortimer Zuckerman, US News and World Report (Zuckerman is also Chairman of Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations ).

David Gelertner, The Weekly Standard

John Podhoretz, The New York Post and The Weekly Standard

Mona Charen, The Washington Times

Morton Kondracke, Roll Call, Fox News formerly of The McLaughlin Group, The New Republic and PBS

Fred Barnes, The Weekly Standard, Fox News, formerly of The New Republic, The McLaughlin Group, and The Baltimore Sun

Sid Zion, The New York Post, The New York Daily News,

Yossi Klein Halevi, The New Republic,

Norman Podhoretz, Commentary, Jonah Goldberg, National Review and CNN

Laura Ingraham, CNN, formerly of MSNBC and CBS News

Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe

Rich Lowry, National Review Andrew Sullivan, The New Republic

Seth Lipsky, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Sun, formerly of the Jewish Forward

Irving Kristol, The Public Interest, The National Interest and The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page

Allan Keyes, MSNBC, WorldNetDaily.com

Brit Hume, Fox News John Leo, US News and World Report

Robert Bartley, The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page

John Fund, The Wall Street Journal OpinionJournal, formerly of The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page

Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page,

Ben Wattenberg, The Washington Times, PBS

Tony Snow, Washington Times and Fox News

Lawrence Kudlow, National Review and CNBC

Alan Dershowitz, Boston Herald, Washington Times

David Horowitz, Frontpage.com

Jacob Heilbrun, The Los Angeles Times

Thomas Sowell, Washington Times

Frank Gaffney Jr, Washington Times

Emmett Tyrell, American Spectator and New York Sun

Cal Thomas, Washington Times

Oliver North, Washington Times and Fox News, formerly of MSNBC

Michael Ledeen, Jewish World Review

William F. Buckley, National Review

Bill O'Reilly, Fox News

Paul Greenberg, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette,

L. Brent Bozell, Washington Times

Todd Lindberg, Washington Times

Michael Barone, US News and World Report and The McLaughlin Group

Ann Coulter, Human Events,

Linda Chavez, Creators Syndicate Cathy Young, Reason Magazine

Uri Dan, New York Post Dr. Laura Schlessinger, morality maven

Rush Limbaugh, radio host

PUBLICATIONS THAT, FOR REASONS OF OWNER OR EDITORSHIP CAN BE COUNTED UPON TO SUPPORT ISRAEL REFLEXIVELY AND WITHOUT QUALIFICATION:

The New Republic (Martin Peretz, Michael Steinhardt, Roger Hertog, Owners)

Commentary (American Jewish Committee, Owner)

US News and World Report (Mortimer Zuckerman, Owner)

The New York Daily News (Mortimer Zuckerman, Owner)

The New York Post (Rupert Murdoch, Owner)

The Weekly Standard (Rupert Murdoch, Owner)

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page (Peter Kann, Editor)

The Atlantic Monthly (Michael Kelly, Editor)

JEWISH COLUMNISTS LIKELY TO CRITICIZE BOTH ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS, BUT VIEW THEMSELVES TO BE CRITICALLY SUPPORTERS OF ISRAEL, AND ULTIMATELY, WOULD SUPPORT ISRAELI SECURITY OVER PALESTINIAN RIGHTS:

Thomas Friedman, The New York Times,

Richard Cohen, The Washington Post and New York Daily News

Avishai Margolit, The New York Review of Books

David Remnick, The New Yorker

Eric Alterman, The Nation and MSNBC.com

The New York Times Editorial Board The Washington Post Editorial Board

COLUMNISTS LIKELY TO BE REFLEXIVELY ANTI-ISRAEL AND/OR PRO-PALESTINIAN REGARDLESS OF CIRCUMSTANCE:

Robert Novak, The Washington Post

Pat Buchanan, WorldNetDaily.com, formerly of The Washington Times and CNN.

Alexander Cockburn, The Nation and New York Press

Christopher Hitchens, The Nation and Vanity Fair

Edward Said, The Nation

As can be seen from this list of lists, the entire anti-Israel contingent of the punditocracy does not add up to a single George Will or William Safire, much less a Wall Street Journal or US News.

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