They make the tractors that harvest your food, the jewelry you wear and the electricity that makes our society run. They sell vegetables at your farmers’ market and help you get connected to the World Wide Web. They give heart surgeons a place to work and kids a place to play after school.

     And whether you work for one of them, a non-profit, or the government, they pay for your job.

     What do they earn for all of their hard work? Abuse.

     Evening news shows have furthered the same anti-business attitudes, reporting on "corporate fat cats," "CEO pay run amok," and executives "paraded and disgraced to jail" – when they bother to mention them at all.

     Gordon Gekko, the investment genius in the movie "Wall Street," inevitably gets invoked when businessmen are studied. His famous line, "Greed is good," seems to have become the foundation for media coverage of businessmen.

     Businessmen on defense were by far the most popular portrayal, appearing more than four times as often as businessmen-philanthropists. CNN’s "Lou Dobbs Tonight" had almost half of its businessmen on defense.

     In stories that had a viewpoint about businessmen, businessmen were portrayed in a defensive posture a third of the time in 2006. The most popular story templates were about money. Consumer prices, company profits and CEO pay were popular targets.

     In a world of Enron and WorldCom, the business names people know are associated with scandal. A July 2007 Harris Poll asked people how they viewed different occupations. The highest rating was "very great prestige." Only 14 percent of respondents said they viewed businessmen as that prestigious. Professionals in the financial services, like stock brokers and bankers, ranked even lower.

     BMI researchers examined all stories appearing from Jan. 1, 2006, to Dec. 31, 2006, on the three broadcast news shows, CNN’s "Lou Dobbs Tonight" and Fox News Channel’s "Your World with Neil Cavuto," for portrayals of businessmen.

     The findings were surprising: businessmen and women in the private sector employ more than 110 million Americans, yet they appeared in just 37 percent of business stories.

     That could be because it’s when something goes wrong that journalists notice business – which can mean executives have legal reasons not to appear on camera. Or maybe they just didn’t want to get raked over the coals, as some businessmen in the study did.

     In this yearlong study of evening news coverage, the Business & Media Institute found that in stories with an obvious viewpoint about businessmen, negative came out on top. American businessmen and women were portrayed negatively 57 percent of the time.

     Certainly, some negativity was warranted. The collapse of Enron alone cost employees and shareholders alike. And journalists were right to report on it. But given the same news to report in 2006, why did the "CBS Evening News" mention Enron’s guilty parties four times as often as ABC’s "World News" did?

     No one has to remind the media to do negative stories. What’s lacking is the rest of the story. Where are the businessmen who give, who help and who inspire?

     There were the outright attacks on "runaway pay" and the stories about "corporate crooks." But demeaning attitudes toward businessmen also crept into otherwise positive stories.

     "He’s so dear. He really is a hometown hero, isn’t he?" said anchor Katie Couric on the December 15 "CBS Evening News." Reporter Steve Hartman had profiled a 17-year-old grocery store owner who had saved the local market in Truman, Minn.

     Hartman’s reply was telling: "He’s a great kid, but he’s a businessman, too. He makes his grandma pay full price for groceries."

     Note the contrast between being "a great kid" and being a "businessman" – how cold-hearted, that he would charge even his own grandmother for groceries. Of course, if everyone’s "hometown hero" started giving away groceries for free, more corner markets would quickly go out of business.

     Famed philosopher and free-market thinker Adam Smith said more than 200 years ago that "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the baker, or the brewer that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

     In other words, goods and services don’t just happen. There are people who create them and work hard to do so. If Americans wish to enjoy good food, electronics, houses and cars, business must go on.

     As Gary Wolfram, a Hillsdale College economist and BMI adviser, has explained, "The greatest wealth is gained by those who produce something for which others willingly give up their income. A system that allows for enormous wealth in this way is one that creates an incentive for people to produce things of enormous value for others."

     Businesspeople are doing just that. They’re inventing and marketing and hoping to offer something that benefits other people – otherwise, they’ll go out of business.

     American businessmen and women – the country’s builders, employers, innovators, taxpayers and philanthropists – are everywhere. The only place it’s hard to find them is on the evening news. 

     That is, of course, until they have a product recall or layoffs. Maybe they have to raise their prices. Then the media will be there waiting to cover it, scrutinizing their balance sheets and making businessmen defend every inch of ground they gain.

     Quite possibly the worst example of an attack on a businessman came from ABC’s Brian Ross. Far from simply putting a CEO in an uncomfortable situation, this "World News" excerpt of a longer ABC interview all but accused a businessman of killing his workers.

     Wilbur Ross, head of the International Coal Group (ICG), was in the reporter’s sights following a tragic collapse at the ICG-owned Sago Mine in West Virginia. Twelve miners died. By January 6, when Brian Ross’s "World News" interview aired, an investigation into the cause of the collapse was under way, but ABC didn’t wait to place blame.

     Elizabeth Vargas opened saying the "billionaire chairman was well aware of the mine’s extensive safety problems." Brian Ross re-emphasized that Wilbur Ross was a "socially prominent billionaire" and pummeled him with stinging questions.

    "Why would you keep it [the mine] open with those records of violations?" Brian Ross said. "Every day, men go down into those holes." "Were you comfortable sending men into that hole?"

     Wilbur Ross could barely get in a word – in the 400-word report, he was shown speaking only 37 words. Even those words were brief responses between being cut off by the reporter.

     With time, the truth about the mine’s collapse and the fallen miners came out. But ABC treated that with a mere news brief.

     On the May 9, 2007, "World News," anchor Charles Gibson read the item that countered reporter Ross’s treatment of the coal CEO.

     "A final report on last year’s Sago Mine disaster offers new details about the explosion that killed 12 miners," Gibson said. "While lightning is blamed, federal investigators identified three root causes of the West Virginia tragedy. They say two lightning bolts struck at the same time, sending an electrical current to a buried cable, touching off the deadly methane blast in a sealed section of the mine."

     Two lightning bolts found guilty after a lengthy investigation. And a brief follow up, with no apologies to the businessman ABC had skewered and practically accused of murder months earlier.

     Usually, however, it wasn’t murder businessmen were accused of – it was making too much money, or not giving away enough.

     Fox News, which on the whole was slightly more negative than positive, had more portrayals of businessmen on defense than any other study category. One interview on the November 30 "Your World with Neil Cavuto" was particularly hard on Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

     Ballmer was trying to promote his company’s new operating system, Vista, but guest anchor Stuart Varney pressed him on practically every topic imaginable. Varney’s volleys included: "You’ve lost your reputation. You’ve lost your reputation as being the innovators." "The stock has done virtually nothing in five years."

     Finally, Varney pointedly asked Ballmer what he did with his personal money.

     "You are worth more than $20 billion," Varney said. "The Democrats are in power. They say there are too many rich people. Bill Gates gives a billion or two away. Warren Buffet gives away billions. What’ve you got planned for your billions?"

     Ballmer answered graciously, "Well, I like to handle things a little bit more privately."

     The media motto seems to be that it’s okay to make money as long as you give it away. But if there’s any hint that a businessman was actually accepting a big paycheck, journalists became critics.

     NBC’s Brian Williams talked of "runaway pay" and "stratospheric sums" on the April 20 "Nightly News," and Anne Thompson described "an unapologetic Lee Raymond, Exxon’s former CEO."

     The idea that CEOs should "apologize" for their pay, even if their companies do well, isn’t new in media coverage.

     "Though both Exxon and UnitedHealthCare prospered and so did their shareholders under Raymond and McGuire’s leadership, some still see their huge compensation packages as CEO pay run amok," Thompson said.

     She ended the report with a class-warfare comparison: "…the outrage remains, with the average CEO taking home by one estimate 431 times what the average worker does."

     CNN’s "Lou Dobbs Tonight" used the same comparison October 19, as Lisa Sylvester and Dobbs editorialized about CEOs.

     "According to the AFL-CIO, the average CEO – now these are just, not the CEOs at the top, but the average chief executive officer – makes 431 times the salary of a median worker in the United States," Sylvester said.

     Dobbs replied: "That would work out to mean that a CEO would make in one day what it would take that so-called average worker two years to earn. That seems just a little disproportionate." Sylvester agreed: "A little unfair indeed, Lou."

     Dobbs and Sylvester, hardly giving an objective report, echoed the same class-warfare "outrage" that NBC’s Thompson had depicted. But as for accuracy and usefulness, their comparison came up short.

     Whether the press used the inflated union comparison or another figure, the comparison itself is a red herring, according to a leading economist.

     But Williams, a BMI adviser and syndicated columnist, explained that companies are faced with putting a value on a good CEO’s contribution – which sometimes amounts to turning around a failing multimillion-dollar business. And they have competition to contend with.

     "If one company has an effective CEO, it is not the only company that would like to have him on the payroll," Williams wrote. "In order to keep him, the company must pay him enough so that he can't be lured elsewhere."

     Sometimes during the year stories set up businessmen so that their answers looked feeble in the face of an onslaught of criticism. In those cases, having the businessman in the story didn’t do much to help his case. In fact, it probably hurt because of the way the journalists presented things.

     CBS gave James May, president of the Air Transport Association, a quick lesson about this tactic by letting him provide an answer to his industry’s woes – after those woes had been described in detail.

     "Two hundred thousand jobs have been eliminated in the past five years," said CBS’s Bob Orr on April 8. "Pensions and benefits have been scratched. But that's not been enough. Fuel costs three times what it did in 1998, the last year airlines made a profit."

     Orr spent most of the story building the case against the airlines, mentioning rising passenger costs and union negotiations.

     Near the end of the story, he showed May saying, "I think the passenger has got the best deal they've ever had."

     Likewise, on April 22 CBS was setting up a case for oil "price gouging." Reporter Tony Guida accused: "Not hard to believe when you see prices at the pump jump three cents overnight, but Big Oil says, ‘Don’t blame us.’"

     With the deck already stacked against him, John Felmy of the American Petroleum Institute had a mere 11 words to argue: "Our companies don’t set the price. The market sets the prices."

     Whether it was consumer prices, profits, or their own pay, businessmen spent a lot of time defending the role of money in business. Journalists also cited at least 19 businessmen for layoffs, while several more had to stammer in response to E.coli scares in food distribution. The defensive category was by far the largest in the positive or negative portrayals of businessmen.

     And those were just the law-abiding ones.

<Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Next>

Or jump to section:

The Defense Never Rests  •  ‘Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen’ – and We Covered it 105 Times Philanthropy  •  Small Business vs. Big Business  •  Good Stories
Conclusion  •  Recommendations  •  Methodology