Deck Stacking
editDeck Stacking is the process of loading most of the positions in the media companies-the editors, managers, and reporters-with unshakably loyal personnel. The elite professionals, some of whom make multiple millions of dollars a year, strongly support corporate ownership's interests and generally avoid issues that would be directly or indirectly critical of them.[1] Sociologist Christopher B. Doob illustrates this phenomenon by citing a 1990s study by a nonprofit organization by the name of Essential Actions. This study was a quantitative study of four Sunday monrning programs: NBC's Meet the Press, NBC's The McLaughlin Group, CBS's Face the Nation, and ABC's This Week. A major finding was that topics linked to corporate power-environmental pollution, corporate crime, labor unions, corporate welfare (government-provided economic boosts to big business), national healthcare, renewable energy, business deregulation, and the increase of corporate profits-constituted less than 4 percent of the show's discussion topics.[2] Doob explains that each of these mass-media corporations have executives from multi-billion dollar corporations seated at their boardroom tables influencing the daily innerworkings of the press.