In 2020 the executives and administrators who control most mass media institutions and universities in New York City and elsewhere claim to be opposed to institutional racism and systemic racism in the United States and elsewhere.
But, historically, when the Gannett Company media conglomerate owned 81 daily local newspapers in various U.S. cities (besides also owning the USA Today national newspaper), 16 commercial radio stations and 10 commercial television broadcasting stations in the late 20th century, only 5 of the 81 local publishers who supervised Gannett's local newspapers were African-American. And in 1978, according to The Media Monopoly book by Ben Bagdikian, an African-American media group protested that Gannett's history of hiring minorities was "worse than the industry average" and that, in the New York State city of Rochester, Gannett's newspapers "had refused to print Urban League reports of supermarket price discrimination" in African-American neighborhoods "for fear of offending advertisers."
Yet by 1991 the Columbia University administration had accepted over $30 million in grants from the "non-profit" Gannett Foundation, which still owned 10 percent (then worth over $600 million) of Gannett media conglomerate stock, to fund and operate a "Gannett Center for Media Studies" at its School of Journalism, between 1984 and 1996, on Columbia's Upper West Side campus in West Harlem/Morningside Heights--despite the apparent historical evidence that the Gannett Company's newspapers were being managed in an institutionally racist way.
Ben Bagdikian also observed in his late 20th-Century book, The Media Monopoly, that "Gannett Company, Inc." was "an outstanding contemporary performer of the ancient rite of creating self-serving myths, of committing acts of greed and exploitation but describing them through its own machinery as heroic epics." Yet "in real life," according to Bagdikian's book, "Gannett has violated laws, doctrines of free enterprise and journalistic ideals of truthfulness."
The Gannett Company was started in 1906 by a politically conservative, anti-liquor prohibitionist, named Frank Gannett, after Gannett purchased a daily newspaper in Elmira, New York for $3,000 in cash and $17,000 in borrowed money. Secretly financed by the International Paper and Power Company, a private power utility company in the first third of the 20th Century, Frank Gannett then purchased additional U.S. newspapers until he controlled a chain of newspapers that "were inflexibly conservative," according to The Media Monopoly book. Given the special influence that the International Paper & Power Company obtained by financing the growth of Frank Gannett's media operation, it is not difficult to understand why "the Gannett papers were enthusiastic supporters of the power trust and scathing attackers of public ownership of generating plants," according to the same book..
In the 1930's, the Gannett Company founder decided to form the anti-New Deal "Committee To Uphold Constitutional Government," which successfully lobbied for the defeat of several proposed New Deal liberal reforms and attacked such New Deal liberal reforms as social security and increased taxation of the Super-Rich. According to the 1945 edition of Current Biography, Frank Gannett's anti-New Deal lobbying in the 1930's "earned for him from New Deal supporters the label of economic royalist." Prior to his death in 1957, Frank Gannett was also a Cornell University trustee, as well as a lord of the press. In addition, Frank Gannett also used much of his Gannett newspaper chain wealth to finance an unsuccessful 1940 campaign for the U.S. presidency on an anti-liquor, Prohibitionist platform.
In 2020, the Gannett Company media conglomerate is now owned by the Midtown Manhattan-based Fortress investment Group LLC firm of corporate stock speculators and real estate deal-makers, whose shareholders voted in November 2019 to merge New Media and Gannett, but retain the Gannett name. According to a Feb. 4, 2020 "Neighbor News" article that Alex Gama posted on Patch's New York City, NY site," the Fortress investment Group has built a $41.5 billion portfolio of assets;" and, prior to the spread of COVID-19 to Manhattan in 2020, was "committed to TSX Broadway, a $2.5 billion project on New York's Times Square" that was to "include a brand new 669-room luxury hotel."
According to the Gannett Company website, the media subsidiary of the Fortress Investment Group currently has a "portfolio" which "includes the USA Today, local media organizations in 46 states in the US and Guam" and "Newsquest, a wholly owned subsidiary with over 140 local media brands operating in the United Kingdom." And in 2020, the Fortress Investment Group's Gannett Company controls,for example, 12 daily newspapers in New Jersey and 10 daily newspapers in New York State, including the Westchester Journal News, the Poughkeepsie Journal, the Binghamton Press and Sun Bulletin, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, the Utica Times Telegram, the Elmira Star Gazette and the Ithaca Journal.
Besides now owning the Gannett media conglomerate, the Fortress Investment Group also owns New Fortress Energy [NFE], which "is a fully integrated, global provider of natural gas-fueled energy solutions," that "owns and operates a growing network of liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, power generation facilities and natural gas logistics infrastructure" and "has 5 operational facilities across the Caribbean and United States with numerous additional projects under development around the world," according to the Fortress Investment Group website.
Yet until Columbia University's School of Journalism more fully examines why it historically accepted over $30 million in funding from a foundation that owned stock in a Gannett media conglomerate which was allegedly being run in an institutionally racist way during the 1980's, in order to establish its 1984 to 1996 "Gannett Center for Media Studies," it's not likely that its journalism students will discover how a Fortress Investment Group that seeks to profit from investing in the fossil fuel industry ended up gaining control of so many U.S. daily newspapers in the New York State and New Jersey in the 21st-century.
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August 24, 2020 at 02:57AM
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Media Racism History 101: Part 1 - Patch.com
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