From Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class

The pressure of the meetings by the corporations like General Motors, the oil companies, and the drug companies with the editorial people, andd probably with the publishers, coincided with the emergence of the most destructive force to the citizen movement mise-en-scene:  Abe Rosenthal, the editor of the New York Times, Rosenthal was a Right-winger from Canada who hated Communism, came here, and hated Progressivism.  The Times was not doing well at the time.  Rosenthal was commissioned to expand the suburban sections, which required a lot of advertising.  He was very receptive to the entreaties of corporations, and he did not like me.  I would give material to Jack Morris in the Washington bureau, and it would not get in the paper.
Rosenthal, who banned social critics such as Chomsky from being quoted in the paper, decreed that no story built around Nader’s research could be published unless there was a corporate resp0onse.  Corporations, informed at Rosenthal’s dictate, refused to comment on Nader’s research.  This effectively killed the stories.

[…]
Lewis Powell, who was the general counsel to the US Chamber of Commerce, wrote a memo in Aguust 1971 that expressed corporate concern over Nader’s work […]

Moreover, much of the media-for varying motives and in varying degrees-either voluntarily accords unique publicity to these “attackers,” or at least allows them to exploit the media for their purposes. This is especially true of television, which now plays such a predominant role in shaping the thinking, attitudes and emotions of our people.
One of the bewildering paradoxes of our time is the extent to which the enterprise system tolerates, if not participates in, its own destruction.

[…]
The press in the 1980s would say “Why should we cover you?  “Who is your base in Congress?”  I used to be known as someone who could trigger a Congressional hearing pretty fast in the House and Senate.  They started looking toward the neoliberals and neocons and the deregulation mania.  We put out two reports on the benefits of regulation and they, too, disappeared.  They did not get covered at all.  This was about the same time Tony Coelho taught the Democrats, starting in 1979 when he was head of the House Campaign Finance Committee, to start raising big time money from corporate interests.  And they did.  It had a magical effect. […]

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