Study: "For American Businessmen Primetime is Crimetime"

Good Guys and Bad Guys

With all of the public opinion research polls out there how many times have you ever been called to participate in one? It just so happens that yesterday I was called by a polling firm based out of Princeton and the subject just happened to be attitudes toward the mortgage loan industry.

As with all industries there are good guys and bad guys.

And evidently on television too. In a report called “Bad Company, For American Businessmen Primetime is Crimetime,” the conservative Media Research Group monitored over 100 episodes of top shows on ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC during sweeps weeks. They found:

TV Overwhelmingly Negative toward Business: Negative plots about business and businessmen outnumbered positive ones by almost 4-to-1. Of the 39 episodes that included business-related plots or characters, 30 (77 percent) cast businessmen and commerce in a negative light.


Businessmen Are Villains, Not Heroes: When businessmen appeared on TV, they were up to no good. Only NBC’s “Medium” and “Las Vegas” featured businessmen in a consistently positive light.



TV Businessmen a Greater Threat to Society than Terrorists or Gangs: According to primetime TV, you are 21 times more likely to be kidnapped or murdered at the hands of a businessman than the mob. Businessmen also committed crimes five times more often than terrorists and four times more often than gangs.



Businessmen Almost as Likely to Commit a Serious Felony as Career Criminals: Businessmen turned up as kidnappers or murderers almost as often (21 times) as hardened criminals like drug dealers, child molesters and serial killers put together (23 times).



“Law & Order” Franchise Finds Businessmen Guilty: In the three popular NBC shows – “Law & Order,” “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” and “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” – almost 50 percent of the felonies (13 of 27) – mostly murders – were committed by businessmen.


The Worst Network: CBS was the worst of the four networks, offering up far more business criminals than private-sector heroes. Shows like “Cold Case,” “CSI: NY,” and “NCIS” stacked the deck against businessmen.



Best in Show: It’s ironic that network executives had to travel to the gambling and showgirl capital of America – Las Vegas – to portray business in a positive way. But NBC’s show of the same name used this positive narrative to counter “Law & Order’s” cynical portrayal of business.

One must always ask who is being the reflector or director when documenting trends. The web site refers to itself as “The Leader in Documenting, Exposing and Neutralizing Liberal Media Bias.”

The Media Research Group’s Business and Media Institute is at least consistent – they released a report about a decade ago called “Businessmen Behaving Badly,” which found similar results. Of course, they also called Bryant Gumbel a leftist for an offhand remark making light of extreme right wing talk show host Ann Coulter’s recent bizarre comment about 911 widows enjoying their husband’s deaths.

If you like the new report two more are on the way, along with plans “to examine how businessmen are characterized on the silver screen and in TV news.”

iPod Factory ‘Slave Claims’ Reported Today

iPod Factory ‘Slave Claims’ Reported Today

Apple is investigating a newspaper report by The Mail on Sunday that workers in Chinese iPod factories work long hours for low pay and in "slave" conditions. The Mail article alleged that employees earn as little as $49 a month working 15-hour shifts. In a factory near Shanghai the pay for making the iconic product is said to be twice as high, but half of it goes to room and board on site. Apple said it does not accept violations of its supplier code of conduct.

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“Green Treasury?”

Amid speculation that the Bush administration has changed tact recently on a number of fronts, the new Treasury Secretary nominee, Hank Paulson, was touted in a May 30 White House press release as “a strong and consistent voice for corporate accountability. When the corporate scandals broke, Hank showed his leadership and character by calling for reforms that would strengthen the way America's public companies are governed and improve their accounting practices.”

Paulson brings environmental credentials from his days as Chairman and CEO of the investment bank Goldman Sachs. Paulson is said to be quite the corporate environmentalist. He has chaired the board of the Nature Conservancy and was at the helm when Goldman signed onto the Equator Principles, a set of benchmarks for the financial industry to assess social and environmental risks of investments. Goldman issued a comprehensive environmental policy in November of 2005 that called for federal regulation on climate change that is stronger than the Equator Principles. He also served in the Nixon White House in 1972.

See the May 13^th Business-Watch post on the controversy surrounding another one of the more than 30 banks that signed onto the Equator Principles concerning its commitment versus its investments on the ground.

For more info read “The Greening of Goldman” in a June 2006 article in Fast Company, which calls the firm’s commitment “a mostly unproven promise” for now, while also stating that “even the promise is a big deal.”

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Exxon Mobil Postscript

That right of center but ever intelligent and well written magazine The Economist just ran an article -- "Can Business Be Cool?" that serves as a postscript to the Business-Watch June 2^nd piece “Exxon: Despite BIGGEST Profit Ever STILL Won’t Pay for Spill” and the May 24^th post “Carbon Dioxide Is Good For You.”

Exxon: Despite BIGGEST Profit Ever STILL Won’t Pay for Spill

Recent research has shown that “when business executives are in a good mood people who work with them experience “more positive and fewer negative moods.” So one would naturally think that the upper echelons of Exxon Mobil would be absolutely ecstatic after bankrolling the largest profit in the history of the United States ($36.13 Billion).

Perhaps not after the U.S. Justice Department and Alaska called on the recalcitrant company to cough up $92 million to clean up the mess that still exists from their Valdez tanker spill of eleven million gallons of crude oil on 1750 kilometers of coastline that killed 250,000 marine birds, 28,000 sea otters and devastated the local environment and community 17 years ago.

On top of that, the company suffered a humiliating defeat on Wednesday when a shareholder resolution passed its annual meeting with a whopping 52.2% (double digits is considered good) calling for stronger corporate governance measures for electing the board of directors as a result of the CEO’s $400 MILLION departure pay package. Exxon said that this is the first resolution to ever pass over the opposition of management in the history of the company.

A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE EXXON VALDEZ TANKER SPILL SIGNIFICANCE:

• 1989 (March): Exxon Valdez tanker spill
• 1989 (September): Creation of the Valdez principles, a ten-point code of corporate environmental conduct (Later renamed the CERES Principles after the nonprofit of the same name)
• 1993: The first company endorses the CERES (Coalition on Environmentally Responsible Economies) Principles
• 1997: The CERES principles spawn the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) in partnership with the U.N. Environment Program
• 2002: GRI becomes recognized as the gold standard for reporting on economic, social and environmental impacts by institutions and spins off as an independent organization
• 2006: Over 800 companies have issued GRI reports