Networks That Praise
Gates, Bashed Oil Firms
Same media outlets that attacked oil
companies for success compliment Microsoft, a more profitable
corporation.
By Ken Shepherd
Business & Media Institute
June 16, 2006
In the mid-1990s, aside from tobacco companies,
Microsoft (NYSE:
MSFT [1]) and its
CEO Bill Gates were perhaps the medias favorite corporate villain.
Now hes a media darling.
On the March 3, 1998, then
CBS Evening News, [2]
anchor Dan Rather suggested Microsoft needed to be reined in by the
federal government. Some policing may be needed along the
information superhighway, he said, adding that fellow-travelers
say Gates is trying to run them off the road.
A month later on the
April 21, 1998, World News Tonight, [3] ABCs
Peter Jennings warned his audience that millions of everyday
computer users are still anxious that the more omnipresent Microsoft
becomes, the more we computer users will have to do things the Bill
Gates way.
Eight years later, strong profits have put Big Oil in
the medias crosshairs while Gates has become a media hero and
philanthropist.
Evening newscasts for ABC, CBS, and NBC heaped praise
on the Time magazine 2005
Person of the Year [4]
on June 15. Gates was lionized for his work as a businessman and a
philanthropist, a far cry from their slanted coverage just eight
years ago.
Tonight we begin with a man who has truly changed the
world, and in the process changed all of our lives, substitute
anchor Campbell Brown began NBCs Nightly News.
NBC correspondent Anne Thompson presented Gates as a
man of two passions: software and philanthropy. Thompson described
Gates as a visionary who helped make the computer a device we cant
live without.
ABC and CBS similarly lauded Gatess profitable
business ventures and his charity work.
He is the richest man in the world. He founded the
company thats had a more profound impact on modern life than any
other, ABCs Charles Gibson reported, opening World News Tonight.
But now, gushed Gibson, Rather than making money now,
he wants to devote his life to giving it away.
Over at CBS, Evening News anchor Bob Schieffer
pronounced an early verdict from history on Bill Gatess
contributions to the world. Sometimes many years must pass before
we can make a real judgment on the impact someone has had on his or
her time, but surely that is not the case with Bill Gates, who
perhaps more than anyone opened the Internet to people in every part
of the world, Schieffer declared as he set up a report by
correspondent Anthony Mason.
Mason went on to note that Microsoft has grown to more
than 61,000 employees in over 100 countries. It generates almost a
billion dollars in profits every month.
While its true Microsoft has changed the world for the
better while being strongly profitable, the media dont have the
same view of oil companies, which generate far smaller profit
margins in a capital-intensive industry.
According to finance.google.com,
Microsofts [5]
net profit margin of nearly 32 percent far out-ranked Exxon-Mobil
(NYSE:
XOM [6]), ConocoPhilips
(NYSE:
COP [7]), and BP-Amoco (NYSE:
BP [8])
whose 2005 net profit margins were 9.71, 7.28, and 8.8 percents
respectively.
Even so, the media have frequently attacked the oil
industry for record
profits [9] and suggested that a windfall
profits tax [10]
is in order to punish their success.