First of two parts

FEW KNOW that Bill Moyers, now 74, got his start as a public man with a letter to then-Senate Minority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson, in 1954. Johnson was so impressed that he offered the 20-year-old an internship that summer. This eventually led to Mr. Moyers’s becoming President Johnson’s press secretary and de facto chief of staff.

In 11 books, innumerable articles, and, since 1971, as a frequent presence on network and public television, Mr. Moyers has never publicly discussed the reasons for his leaving the Johnson administration in 1967. At the time a wag in the press said that Mr. Moyers had been gunned down at “Credibility Gap” –– the term the press and the country had begun to use for Johnson’s untruths about Vietnam.

Even less known about Mr. Moyers is that, in 1954, the native Oklahoman went by the name of “Billy Don Moyers.” His critics, of whom there are many, will love the implied makeover from good ol’ boy to today’s repository of wisdom asking (in the critics’ view) soft-ball questions of likeminded guests on Bill Moyers’ Journal, his current show on public television.

Mr. Moyers also serves as president of the Schumann Center for Media & Democracy. On June 7, he addressed the National Conference for Media Reform, in Minneapolis, and later adapted his remarks into a magazine article entitled Is the Fourth Estate a Fifth Column?

The headline of the article version, published in In These Times, is striking. The term fifth column was coined by Ernest Hemingway in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. It was the title of his only play, and referred to rightists loyal to Gen. Francisco Franco inside Madrid, while Franco himself was besieging the city with four columns from without. The term was later applied to communists in the United States: what FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called “the enemy within.” Whether applying to rightists or leftists, “fifth column” implies more than philosophical differences. It implies treachery, subversion, clandestinity and venality. This is apparently what Mr. Moyers, who usually chooses words carefully, sees in the media today.

Mr. Moyers’s thesis is that “corporate media collude with democracy’s demise.” Here, he has not chosen his words particularly well. “Collusion” is an animate conspiracy involving two or more human beings, not “media” or “democracy,” which are inanimate. What I think he means is that the rise of corporate media whose executives have no commitment to journalism is concomitant with democracy’s demise.

Mr. Moyers particularly cites the takeover of the Tribune Company’s 12 newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, by real-estate man Sam Zell. Mr. Zell introduced himself to his Times employees by calling himself their “Viagra” –– a crude call, I guess, for hard work (and a metonymic analogy I would call flaccid). He went on to say, ungrammatically, “All what matters to me is the bottom line.”

If Mr. Moyers is the Oracle, let me play the Aura-kill. To those of us who study the media from the objective of wondering about a pink slip with any oncoming Friday’s paycheck, the rise of corporate media is not new. A character like Sam Zell is in fact a throwback to swashbuckling knights of the keyboard such as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. For good or ill (I would say both), much more common today are large corporate bureaucracies overly influenced by one-size-fits-all systems designed by MBAs, whose textbook formulae don’t apply to this business or my job. (I don’t mean my own job; I mean that reporting the news well is a quirky endeavor.)

The bad side of the consolidation of corporate media is the rule by people who don’t know ink from Shinola, or journalism from Colonel Sanders-ism. The good is that the media –– every one of them today –– are businesses undergoing epochal transition. If they do not find a way to survive, the alternative sources of news would be the equivalent of Pravda and Izvestia during the Soviet period.

There are two ways to make a profit in the newspaper business. The easy way is to cut costs by 20 percent, hope that this only cuts quality by 15 percent, which cuts readership by 10 percent, which cuts advertising by 5 percent –– which, crudely subtracting 5 from 20, rewards stockholders by a very inexact 15 percent.

The hard way to make a news-paper profitable is to hire excellent people; to pay them as much per hour as, say, a toll collector on the Massachusetts Turnpike; and to send them on assignments that sometimes prove to be what Billy Don Moyers would recognize from his childhood in Oklahoma as “dry holes.” But in the end, to produce a publication that the public cannot do without. If readership then increases by 10 percent and advertising by 15 percent, the thoroughbred “Hard Way” passes the jackass “Easy Way” in the stretch and wins the Derby going away.

The problem is that, except on taxpayer-supported public broadcasting (where Mr. Moyers works), the hard way hasn’t been working. It may work again, but in the current decade publishers and media companies have believed they had to choose the easy way to survive. Shall we arrest them in the sense of stopping them from doing this? The answer next week.

David A. Mittell Jr. is a member of The Journal’s editorial board.