Former News Corp Boss Admits “The Media Isn’t Going To Change… In Fact It Will Get Worse”
by Erico Matias Tavares via Sinclair & Co.,
ZeroHedge.com
Jun 4, 2017
Marty Pompadur is a reference in the global media industry, where he is involved as an investor, advisor and board member. Until recently he was global vice chairman of media and entertainment for Macquarie Capital based in New York City.
In June 1998, Mr. Pompadur became Executive Vice President of News Corporation, President of News Corporation Eastern and Central Europe and a member of News Corporation’s Executive Management Committee. In January 2000, Mr. Pompadur was appointed Chairman of News Corporation Europe. In his decade with News Corporation, he was instrumental in negotiating the merger of Stream and Telepiu to create Sky Italia in Italy, now one of the world’s most successful Pay-TV businesses and in creating and managing several successful businesses across Europe.
He started his media career at ABC, where he eventually became the youngest person ever to be appointed to the board of directors. He then left to pursue senior career opportunities with other media companies. Mr. Pompadur graduated from Williams College with a BA Degree and from the University of Michigan Law School with a LLB Degree.
E Tavares: Thank you very much for being with us today. You are a seasoned veteran of the media industry and as such we very much appreciate your views on something that is very important to citizens in free societies, and that is having access to reliable and trustworthy news and information. Based on your decades’ long experience, what have been the major changes regarding how news media operates and is disseminated? Not just in terms of technology but the actual business model and content strategies.
M Pompadur: I started in the industry in 1960. Back then we had newspapers, magazines, television and radio. Let’s concentrate on the latter two. If you were a television or radio station, distinguished from a network, you were subject to the rules and regulations of the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”). Some of those rules stipulated that your news had to be fair and balanced, and you had to give equal time to different views. If there was a political race or some kind of a referendum going on you couldn’t just put out one side of the argument. You had to offer equal time to both sides and if you didn’t people would complain to the FCC.
Now, if you were a network – ABC, CBS and NBC in those days – you were not licensed but you were still required to be fair and balanced because their news programming went out on the stations, which insisted that they complied with their own regulations. In the case of ABC, and I think also in the case of CBS and NBC, when I got involved with them and eventually became general manager of the television network the news department did not report to us. They reported to the Board of Directors because they did not want the news department to be influenced by anything – by advertisers and so forth. That’s how it was in the “old days”.
Things have dramatically changed since then. The big change occurred in television. Putting the internet aside for a minute, most people were traditionally getting their news from newspapers, in some sense from magazines like Time and Newsweek and from television. So what set the change in motion? Cable came along, first to assist in distribution. They did not have any original programming. The idea behind cable was that certain places in America did not have three TV stations; they had access to only one or perhaps two with adequate quality. So along came cable and regardless of where you were on the dial it was exactly the same quality on your cable system.
People then came up with the idea of producing their own original content, since now they had the distribution in place. And then came along HBO, CNN and so on. They are not licensed and so there was no restrictions, no limitations, no fair and balanced, no nothing. They basically could say anything they wanted, obviously subject to decency and violence and so forth, but in terms of point of view they could do what they wanted. So it depended on the owner of CNN or MSNBC or Fox News as to whether they wanted to be liberal or conservative. And this was a major, major change. And then came the internet, with outlets like BuzzFeed, Vice and others, which changed the landscape even further.
So the business has dramatically changed over the years. As far as I’m concerned, from the point of view of people getting access to accurate information, it has not changed for the better.
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