Two of the main reasons for the media's reliance on such sources are economy and convenience: Bottom-line considerations dictate that the media concentrate their resources where important news often occurs, where rumours and leaks are plentiful, and where regular press conferences are held. The White House, Pentagon, and the State Department, in Washington, D.C., are centres of such activity.
Government and corporate sources also have the great merit of being recognisable and credible by their status and prestige; moreover, they have the most money available to produce a flow of news that the media can use. For example, the Pentagon has a public-information service employing many thousands of people, spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year, and far outspending not only the public-information resources of any dissenting individual or group but the aggregate of such groups.
Only the corporate sector has the resources to produce public information and propaganda on the scale of the Pentagon and other government bodies. The Chamber of Commerce, a business collective, had a 1983 budget for research, communications, and political activities of $65 million. Besides the US Chamber of Commerce, there are thousands of state and local chambers of commerce and trade associations also engaged in public relations and lobbying activities.
To maintain their pre-eminent position as sources, government and business-news agencies expend much effort to make things easy for news organisations. They provide the media organisations with facilities in which to gather, give journalists advance copies of speeches and upcoming reports; schedule press conferences at hours convenient for those needing to meet news deadlines; write press releases in language that can be used with little editing; and carefully organise press conferences and "photo opportunity" sessions. This means that, in effect, the large bureaucracies of the power elite subsidise the mass media by contributing to a reduction of the media's costs of acquiring the raw materials of, and producing, news. In this way, these bureaucracies gain special access to the media.
Thus "[e]conomics dictates that they [the media] concentrate their resources were significant news often occurs, where important rumours and leaks abound, and where regular press conferences are held. . . [Along with state bodies] business corporations and trade groups are also regular purveyors of stories deemed newsworthy. These bureaucracies turn out a large volume of material that meets the demands of news organisations for reliable, scheduled flows." [Ibid., pp. 18-19]
The dominance of official sources would, of course, be weakened by the existence of highly respectable unofficial sources that gave dissident views with great authority. To alleviate this problem, the power elite uses the strategy of "co-opting the experts" — that is, putting them on the payroll as consultants, funding their research, and organising think tanks that will hire them directly and help disseminate the messages deemed essential to elite interests. "Experts" on TV panel discussions and news programs are often drawn from such organisations, whose funding comes primarily from the corporate sector and wealthy families — a fact that is, of course, never mentioned on the programs where they appear.