News media are supposed to have one thing going for them: truth. The public is supposed to trust them to report on current events fully, evenhandedly, openly and honestly, and to collect information with integrity and diligence in ethical ways.

But when those same entities lie to their own workers and stonewall, disguise or mislead the public about their own corporate behaviors, that all raises concerns about the integrity of the product itself, as members of the former Los Angeles Newspaper Guild/Southern California Media Guild and the Concerned Readers Committee/Concerned Media Consumers Committee of Southern Califonria repeatedly discovered -- which is why this site was founded in 1998.

The questions we posed to ourselves, to journalists and to the public were: Can these companies be trusted? As employers? As sources for news? As corporate citizens? Should you patronize them? Should you work for them? Media consolidation and our experiences as media workers and consumers in the greater Los Angeles/Southern California area prompted these concerns and monitoring.

The Concerned Media Consumers Committee of Southern California (CMCC) is an outgrowth of the Concerned Readers Committee that formed after the late-1997 takeover of the Long Beach Press-Telegram by MediaNews Group,which slashed wages, staff, working conditions and benefits, attacked in-depth coverage and expertise and openly scorned investigative reporting while at the same time lied to the public about all this. MediaNews has gone on to take over and "cluster" most of the suburban daily newspapers of the greater Los Angeles/Inland Empire region.

We don't have a problem with the basic concept of "clustering" (efficiency, economies of scale, etc.), but we DO have a problem with the inhumane and deceptive way MediaNews went about enacting these changes. And now rampant media consolidation by the likes of News Corp. (Fox), Clear Channel (your local radio station), Viacom (CBS/Paramount), GE (NBC, Universal) and Disney (ABC/ESPN) have only made bad situations worse when it comes to journalism in the name of public service: news staff cutbacks, hidden agendas, self-serving censorship or promotion, selective lack of coverage, etc. Thus we continue to monitor and alert the public (see especially our various links at left).

Credibility Watch, a function of the CMCC, is a separate group from the Southern California Media Guild (SCMG), which, however, had hosted this site and helped start the initial Concerned Readers group; SCMG units subsequently merged in summer 2001 with CWA Local 9400. CMCC keeps in touch with Local 9400's NEAC -- the Newspaper Employees Advisory Committee, essentially the SCMG sector of Local 9400.