When Victims Rule

1 24 JEWISH INFLUENCE IN THE MASS MEDIA, Part II In 1985 Laurence Tisch, Chairman of the Board of New York University, former President of the Greater New York United Jewish Appeal, an active supporter of Israel, and a man of many other roles, started buying stock in the CBStelevision network through his company, the Loews Corporation. The Tisch family, worth an estimated 4 billion dollars, has major interests in hotels, an insurance company, Bulova, movie theatres, and Loliards, the nation's fourth largest tobacco company (Kent, Newport, True cigarettes). Brother Andrew Tisch has served as a Vice-President for the UJA-Federation, and as a member of the United Jewish Appeal national youth leadership cabinet, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Israel Political Action Committee, among other Jewish organizations. By September of 1986 Tisch's company owned 25% of the stock of CBS and he became the company's president. And Tisch -- now the most powerful man at CBS -- had strong feelings about television, Jews, and Israel. The CBS news department began to live in fear of being compromised by their boss -- overtly, or, more likely, by intimidation towards self-censorship -- concerning these issues. "There have been rumors in New York for years," says J. J. Goldberg, "that Tisch took over CBS in 1986 at least partly out of a desire to do something about media bias against Israel." [GOLDBERG, p. 297] The powerful President of a major American television network dare not publicize his own active bias in favor of another country, of course. That would look bad, going against the grain of the democratic traditions, free speech, and a presumed "fair" mass media. And if it ever became clear that the CBS news department was in danger of turning into an ad agency for Israel, the resulting controversy would probably defeat Tisch's purpose in helping them. But word leaked out, that CBS news under Laurence Tisch lived in fear of being ethically compromised. During the Palestinian Intifada (the stone-throwing revolt by Palestinian Arabs against Israeli military rule), a birthday party was held by Jewish TV personality Barbara Walters and her husband Merv Adelson for Jewish Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan. Other invited Jewish guests included former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and U.S. News and World Report publisher, Mortimer Zuckerman. According to Roone Arledge, the President of ABC News, who was also a guest at the party, a long and heated debate arose about television's depiction of the Israeli military's attempts to crush Arab rioting. CBS President Tisch argued that TV should effectively censor reports on what was happening, that "television ought to be banned in the occupied territories "because it portrayed Israeli soldiers in a bad light. Kissinger had argued the same a few weeks earlier, publicly concerned that "TV cameras incited riots and tarnished Israel's reputation." Arledge vehemently argued that the media's ethical stand should be to be present and report whatever was happening, when and wherever possible. Barbara Walters and Mortimer Zuckerman covered for Tisch and they all denied that he took such an irresponsibly biased, and disturbing, position. According to (Jewish) reporter Ken Auletta, however, 1 2 eight other people at the party testified -- five to him personally -- that Tisch did. Jewish guests at the party, led by Tisch, also attacked Arledge's ABC anchorman (who was not present) Peter Jennings, for being -- as they saw it -- too "anti-Israel. "Several guests," writes Auletta, "came away deeply distressed by Tisch's behavior. What disturbed them was that the President of CBS seemed to say that the perceived interests of Israel took precedence over the interests of CBS News. Tisch's reflex, they felt, was to defend Israel, not his network; he was blaming Jennings and the press for reporting Israel's excesses, not Israel committing them. " [AULETTA p. 488-490] Tisch's strong emotions about Israel were exhibited in other ways. After CBS's popular news program, 60 Minutes, did a story about the Jewish lobbying group AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), Tisch was furious with his employees because the program made Jews, to his eyes, look too powerful. (Curiously, long-time CBS reporter, David Schoenburn, notes that both 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt, and 60 Minutes reporter, Mike Wallace (both Jewish), "were personal friends of Larry Tisch." [SCHOENBURN, p. 6]) Tisch reportedly even called the reporter of the AIPAC story, Wallace, a self-hating Jew. Tom Wyman, the non-Jewish CEO of CBS, joined in the fray, at another party. He was reported by Newsweek to have complained "that Tisch's enthusiasm for 'pro-Israel' causes and charities might compromise the independent reporting of CBS news." [AULETTA, p. 164] This attitude by powerful Jewish media figures reflects a certain tradition, and recalls the case in the late 1940s of Adolph Schwimmer who "became the Jewish state's prime [arms] smuggler in America." Among his close contacts was Herman "Hank" Greenspun, the publisher of the Las Vegas Sun. Greenspun once noted that he was a Zionist "before I could even identify a picture of George Washington." [RAVIV, p. 40] During Israel's "War of Independence" in 1948, Greenspun traveled to "Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Panama, where he organized false documents, bank guarantees, and arms shipments to Israel." [RAVIV, p. 41] "Hank Greenspun," notes Alex Pelle, "embarked on an incredible odyssey, plundering a naval depot in Hawaii, seizing a private yacht at gunpoint near Wilmington, California, and posing in Mexico as a confidential agent of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's government. A single driving purpose generated over the span of seven months all those seemingly unrelated events: to fill the holds of a ship ... with six thousand tons of contraband rifles, machine guns, howitzers, cannons, and ammunition, destined for the port of Haifa and Israel's beleaguered Jews. In so doing, Hank Greenspun had violated the United States' Neutrality Act, the Export Control Law, and Presidential Proclamation 2776." Thanks to Jewish lobbying pressure, Greenspun was pardoned by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. [GREENSPUN, H., 1966, p. ix] ********************************************* 2 3 In 1989 the Time Inc. corporate media giant merged with Warner Communications to become Time- Warner Communications, the largest media organization at the time in the world. (Sigmund Warburg, an internationally renowned Jewish banker who represented the London Daily Mirror Group, then the largest newspaper company on earth, had years earlier tried to buy Time, Inc., to no avail). [CLURMAN, p. 31] When the dust had settled this time, Steve Ross, a Jewish entrepreneur who started out working for a funeral home, sat astride the monstrous merger, the highest paid corporate executive in America. His $39.1 million in 1990 as co-CEO, sole chairman and chief decision-maker, was 1,363 per cent above the corporate average. [CLURMAN p. 304] The merger, notes Richard Clurman, "was the creation of the biggest media empire, the corporate interfaith marriage of the sixty-seven-year-old Time Inc., a WASPy blue-chip American institution, for years the largest combined magazine and book publisher on earth, to Steven J. Ross's poker-chip Warner Communications, Inc., the pop entertainment conglomerate whose movies and sounds of music ricochet around the world." The Time Inc. stable included such venerable publishing mainstays as Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, People, Money, Time-Life Books, the Little-Brown publishing house, HBO (long time chief: Michael Fuchs), the Book of the Month Club, and television stations. It even held a 20.5% share in the ownership of Turner Broadcasting (of CNN fame) and 10.5% voting power in it. Warner contributed the likes of Lorimar Television, Atco-East/West Records, Atlantic Recording,Quincy Jones Entertainment, Elektra Communications, DC Comics, as well as the Batman movie, Rod Stewart, Madonna, Bugs Bunny, and the rest of its vast movie-music empire. (By 1997 Time-Warner even owned the rights to the photographs, other images, and words of Martin Luther King, Jr.) In his earlier years, Ross had revitalized Warner-Seven Arts by buying cable-TV monopolies, as well as major interests in the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team, Ralph Lauren perfume and cosmetics, and other investments. A month after the Time-Warner merger, federal bank regulators instituted new restrictions to hinder such "highly leveraged transactions." [CLURMAN, p. 33] Steve Ross (whose father changed his surname from Rechnitz, and whose former stepfather, William Paley, for decades controlled CBS) was widely known as a man of dubious ethics and caused consternation among many journalists at Time that such a man was about to take them all over. He has been an "unindicted co-conspirator" in a 1979 United States Justice Department case investing underworld money laundering operation in suburban New York City. His "top lieutenant" at Warners took the fall and admitted guilt; likewise, Warners' assistant treasurer (who handled Ross's personal accounts) was also convicted of fraud and perjury. [CLURMAN, p. 29] In earlier years Ross had merged his funeral home operation with a parking lot company, Kinney National Service, which had its own "unsavory reputation." "There were rumors that Kinney was mobbed up [i.e., tainted by organized crime]," notes Fred Goodman, "Caesar Kinney, Kinney's executive vice president and original owner of Kinney's parking lot business, was the son of Emmanuel Kinney, a well-known New Jersey gambler." [GOODMAN, p. 137-138] (In 1969 Ross and the Kinney company bought Warner-Seven Arts from Elliott Hyman for $400 million. [Sam Kinney had been head of production; Benny Kalmensan was the number two man.] For his part, Hyman's earlier company was Associated Artists Productions, which had purchased the entire pre-1948 Warners film library in 1956.

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