Gunnar Haga

Democracy and the Paradoxes of News Media: Watergate and Iran-contra Gunnar Haga

In this book, the focus is on media ownership of the news media and the effects this might have on news media reporting. We will focus on two relatively recent historical events relevant to what is here described as 'democratic practice,' i.e. the actual state of a functioning democracy. These events, Watergate and Iran-Contra, are used as test cases to detect possible variations in reporting on the part of the corporate news media in the United States, including ABC news, NBC news, and CBS news. It is often suggested that media consolidation and monopolization has had an adverse effect on the news medias ability to be objective, and or to represent democratic structures presupposed in pluralist notions of a demcoratic society. As we will see, the ability of the news media to function as a watch dog for the public has been seriously compromised, consistent with recent notions of a monopolizing media. This book deals with the consequences of this during political crises in the United States.