A
Meager Junkfood diet for the Global Mind
Dear Team:
Harvest of Gems and Forty Immutable Parables is not psychic
junk food for the global mind. But here is a sketch of the the
daunting psychic landscape. The planet is being entertained
and half-informed about the realities of life in this distant
corner of the galaxy.... it's a subtle form of black stress.
9/11 was a gross form of black stress reaction. Temporary space-out
was the result for all. White stress was followed by new forms
of black stress both subtle and gross.
Keep
the faith....see you in Southern Poland someday.
Michael
The
media cartel and its cultural effects
For
all their economic clout and cultural sway, the ten great multinationals
profiled in our latest chart--AOL Time Warner, Disney, General
Electric, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, Sony, Bertelsmann,
AT&T and Liberty Media--rule the cosmos only at the moment.
The media cartel that keeps us fully entertained and permanently
half-informed is always growing here and shriveling there, with
certain of its members bulking up while others slowly fall apart
or get digested whole. But while the players tend to come and
go--always with a few exceptions--the overall Leviathan itself
keeps getting bigger, louder, brighter, forever taking up more
time and space, in every street, in countless homes, in every
other head.
The
rise of the cartel has been a long time coming (and it still
has some way to go). It represents the grand convergence of
the previously disparate US culture industries--many of them
vertically monopolized already--into one global superindustry
providing most of our imaginary "content." The movie
business had been largely dominated by the major studios in
Hollywood; TV, like radio before it, by the triune axis of the
networks headquartered in New York; magazines, primarily by
Henry Luce (with many independent others on the scene); and
music, from the 1960s, mostly by the major record labels. Now
all those separate fields are one, the whole terrain divided
up among the giants--which, in league with Barnes & Noble,
Borders and the big distributors, also control the book business.
(Even with its leading houses, book publishing was once a cottage
industry at both the editorial and retail levels.) For all the
democratic promise of the Internet, moreover, much of cyberspace
has now been occupied, its erstwhile ildernesses swiftly paved
and lighted over by the same colossi. The only industry not
yet absorbed into this new world order is the newsprint sector
of the Fourth Estate--a business that was heavily shadowed to
begin with by the likes of Hearst and other, regional grandees,
flush with the ill-gotten gains of oil, mining and utilities--and
such absorption is, as we shall see, about to happen.
Thus
what we have today is not a problem wholly new in kind but rather
the disastrous upshot of an evolutionary process whereby that
old problem has become considerably larger--and that great quantitative
change, with just a few huge players now co-directing all the
nation's media, has brought about enormous qualitative changes.
For one thing, the cartel's rise has made extremely rare the
sort of marvelous exception that has always popped up, unexpectedly,
to startle and revivify the
culture--the genuine independents among record labels, radio
stations, movie theaters, newspapers, book publishers and so
on. Those that don't fail nowadays are so remarkable that they
inspire not emulation but amazement. Otherwise, the monoculture,
endlessly and noisily triumphant, offers,
by and large, a lot of nothing, whether packaged as "the
news" or "entertainment."
Of
all the cartel's dangerous consequences for American society
and culture, the worst is its corrosive influence on journalism.
Under AOL Time Warner, GE, Viacom et al., the news is, with
a few exceptions, yet another version of the entertainment that
the cartel also vends nonstop. This is also nothing new--consider
the newsreels of yesteryear--but the gigantic scale and thoroughness
of the corporate concentration has made a world of difference,
and so has made this world a very different
place.
Let
us start to grasp the situation by comparing this new centerfold
with our first outline of the National Entertainment State,
published in the spring of 1996. Back then, the national TV
news appeared to be a tidy tetrarchy: two network news divisions
owned by large appliance makers/weapons manufacturers (CBS by
Westinghouse, NBC by General Electric), and the other two bought
lately by the nation's top purveyors of Big Fun (ABC by Disney,
CNN by Time Warner). Cable was still relatively immature, so
that, of its many enterprises, only CNN competed with the broadcast
networks' short-staffed newsrooms; and its buccaneering founder,
Ted Turner, still seemed to call the shots from his new aerie
at Time Warner headquarters.
Today
the telejournalistic firmament includes the meteoric Fox News
Channel, as well as twenty-six television stations owned outright
by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (which holds majority ownership
in a further seven). Although ultimately thwarted in his bid
to buy DirecTV and thereby dominate the US satellite television
market, Murdoch wields a pervasive influence on the news--and
not just in New York, where he has two TV stations, a major
daily (the faltering New York Post) and the Fox News Channel,
whose inexhaustible platoons of shouting heads attracts a fierce
plurality of cable-viewers. Meanwhile, Time Warner has now merged
with AOL--so as to own the cyberworks through which to market
its floodtide of movies, ball games, TV shows, rock videos,
cartoons, standup routines and (not least) bits from CNN, CNN
Headline News, CNNfn (devised to counter GE's CNBC) and CNN/Sports
Illustrated (a would-be rival to Disney's ESPN franchise). While
busily cloning CNN, the parent company has also taken quiet
ste to make it more like Fox, with Walter Isaacson, the new
head honcho, even visiting the Capitol to seek advice from certain
rightist pols on how, presumably, to make the network even shallower
and more obnoxious. (He also courted Rush Himself.) All this
has occurred since the abrupt defenestration of Ted Turner,
who now belatedly laments the overconcentration of the cable
business: "It's sad we're losing so much diversity of thought,"
he confesses, sounding vaguely like a writer for this magazine.
Whereas
five years ago the clueless Westinghouse owned CBS, today the
network is a property of the voracious Viacom--matchless cable
occupier (UPN, MTV, MTV2, VH1, Nickelodeon, the Movie Channel,
TNN, CMT, BET, 50 percent of Comedy Central, etc.), radio colossus
(its Infinity Broadcasting--home to Howard Stern and Don Imus--owns
184 stations), movie titan (Paramount Pictures), copious publisher
(Simon & Schuster, Free Press, Scribner), a big deal on
the web and one of the largest US outdoor advertising firms.
Under Viacom, CBS News has been obliged to help sell Viacom's
product--in 2000, for example, devoting epic stretches of The
Early Show to what lately happened on Survivor (CBS). Of course,
such synergistic bilge is commonplace, as is the tendency to
dummy up on any topic that the parent company (or any of its
advertisers) might want stifled. These journalistic sins have
been as frequent under "longtime" owners Disney and
GE as under Viacom and Fox [see Janine Jaquet, "The Sins
of Synergy," page 20]. They may also abound beneath Vivendi,
whose recent purchase of the film and TV units of USA Networks
and new stake in the satellite TV giant EchoStar--moves too
recent for inclusion in our chart--could soon mean lots of oblique
self-promotion on USAM News, in L'Express and L'Expansion, and
through whatever other news-machines the parent buys.
Such
is the telejournalistic landscape at the moment--and soon it
will mutate again, if Bush's FCC delivers for its giant clients.
On September 13, when the minds of the American people were
on something else, the commission's GOP majority voted to "review"
the last few rules preventing perfect oligopoly. They thus prepared
the ground for allowing a single outfit to own both a daily
paper and a TV station in the same market--an advantage that
was outlawed in 1975. (Even then, pre-existing cases of such
ownership were grandfathered in, and any would-be owner could
get that rule waived.) That furtive FCC "review" also
portended the elimination of the cap on the percentage of US
households that a single owner might reach through its TV stations.
Since the passage of the
Telecommunications Act of 1996, the limit had been 35 percent.
Although that most indulgent bill was dictated by the media
giants themselves, its restrictions are too heavy for this FCC,
whose chairman, Michael Powell, has called regulation per e
"the oppressor."
And
so, unless there's some effective opposition, the several-headed
vendor that now sells us nearly all our movies, TV, radio, magazines,
books, music and web services will soon be selling us our daily
papers, too--for the major dailies have, collectively, been
lobbying energetically for that big waiver, which stands to
make their owners even richer (an expectation that has no doubt
had a sweetening effect on coverage of the Bush Administration).
Thus the largest US newspaper conglomerates--the New York Times,
the Washington Post, Gannett, Knight-Ridder and the Tribune
Co.--will soon be formal partners with, say, GE, Murdoch, Disney
and/or AT&T; and then the lesser nationwide chains (and
the last few independents) will be ingested, too, going the
way of most US radio stations. America's cities could turn into
informational "company towns," with one behemoth owning
all the local print organs--daily paper(s), alternative weekly,
city magazine--as well as the TV and radio stations, the multiplexes
and the cable system. (Recently a federal appeals court told
the FCC to drop its rule preventing any one company from serving
more than 30 percent of US cable subscribers; and in December,
the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.) While such a setup
may make economic sense, as anticompetitive arrangements tend
to do, it has no place in a democracy, where the people have
to know more than their masters want to tell them.
That
imperative demands reaffirmation at this risky moment, when
much of what the media cartel purveys to us is propaganda, commercial
or political, while no one in authority makes mention of "the
public interest"--except to laugh it off. "I have
no idea," Powell cheerily replied at his first press conference
as chairman, when asked for his own definition of that crucial
concept. "It's an empty vessel in which people pour in
whatever their preconceived views or biases are." Such
blithe obtuseness has marked all his public musings on the subject.
In a speech before the American Bar Association in April 1998,
Powell offered an ironic little riff about how thoroughly he
doesn't get it: "The night after I was sworn in [as a commissioner],
I waited for a visit from the angel of the public interest.
I waited all night, but she did not come." On the other
hand, Powell has never sounded glib about his sacred obligation
to the corporate interest. Of his decision to move forward with
the FCC vote just two days after 11, Powell spoke as if that
sneaky move had been a gesture in the spirit of Patrick Henry:
"The flame of the American ideal may flicker, but it will
never be extinguished. We will do our small part and press on
with our business, solemnly, but resolutely."
Certainly
the FCC has never been a democratic force, whichever party has
been dominant. Bill Clinton championed the disastrous Telecom
Act of 1996 and otherwise did almost nothing to impede the drift
toward oligopoly. (As Newsweek reported in 2000, Al Gore was
Rupert Murdoch's personal choice for President. The mogul apparently
sensed that Gore would happily play ball with him, and also
thought--correctly--that the Democrat would win.)
What
is unique to Michael Powell, however, is the showy superciliousness
with which he treats his civic obligation to address the needs
of people other than the very rich. That spirit has shone forth
many times--as when the chairman genially compared the "digital
divide" between the information haves and have-nots to
a "Mercedes divide" between the lucky few who can
afford great cars and those (like him) who can't. In the intensity
of his pro-business bias, Powell recalls Mark Fowler, head of
Reagan's FCC, who famously denied his social obligations by
asserting that TV is merely "an appliance," "a
toaster with pictures." And yet such Reaganite bons mots,
fraught with the anti-Communist fanaticism of the late cold
war, evinced a deadly earnestness that's less apparent in General
Powell's son. He is a blithe, postmodern sort of ideologue,
attuned to the complacent smirk of Bush the Younger--and, of
course, just perfect for the cool and snickering culture of
TV.
Although
such flippancies are hard to take, they're also easy to refute,
for there is no rationale for such an attitude. Take "the
public interest"--an ideal that really isn't hard to understand.
A media system that enlightens us, that tells us everything
we need to know pertaining to our lives and liberty and happiness,
would be a system dedicated to the public interest. Such a system
would not be controlled by a cartel of giant corporations, because
those entities are ultimately hostile to the welfare of the
people. Whereas we need to know the truth about such corporations,
they often have an interest in suppressing it (as do their advertisers).
And while it takes much time and money to find out the truth,
the parent companies prefer to cut the necessary costs of journalism,
much preferring the sort of lurid fare that can drive endless
hours of agitated jabbering. (Prior to 9/11, it was Monica,
then Survivor and Chandra Levy, whereas, since the fatal day,
we have had mostly anthrax, plus much heroic foota from the
Pentagon.) The cartel's favored audience, moreover, is that
stratum of the population most desirable to advertisers--which
has meant the media's complete abandonment of working people
and the poor. And while the press must help protect us against
those who would abuse the powers of government, the oligopoly
is far too cozy with the White House and the Pentagon, whose
faults, and crimes, it is unwilling to expose. The media's big
bosses want big favors from the state, while the reporters are
afraid to risk annoying their best sources. Because of such
politeness (and, of course, the current panic in the air), the
US coverage of this government is just a bit more edifying than
the local newscasts in Riyadh.
Against
the daily combination of those corporate tendencies--conflict
of interest, endless cutbacks, endless trivial pursuits, class
bias, deference to the king and all his men--the public interest
doesn't stand a chance. Despite the stubborn fiction of their
"liberal" prejudice, the corporate media have helped
deliver a stupendous one-two punch to this democracy. (That
double whammy followed their uncritical participation in the
long, irrelevant jihad against those moderate Republicans, the
Clintons.) Last year, they helped subvert the presidential race,
first by prematurely calling it for Bush, regardless of the
vote--a move begun by Fox, then seconded by NBC, at the personal
insistence of Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric. Since the
coup, the corporate media have hidden or misrepresented the
true story of the theft of that election.
And
having justified Bush/Cheney's coup, the media continue to betray
American democracy. Media devoted to the public interest would
investigate the poor performance by the CIA, the FBI, the FAA
and the CDC, so that those agencies might be improved for our
protection--but the news teams (just like Congress) haven't
bothered to look into it. So, too, in the public interest, should
the media report on all the current threats to our security--including
those far-rightists targeting abortion clinics and, apparently,
conducting bioterrorism; but the telejournalists are unconcerned
(just like John Ashcroft). So should the media highlight, not
play down, this government's attack on civil liberties--the
mass detentions, secret evidence, increased surveillance, suspension
of attorney-client privilege, the encouragements to spy, the
warnings not to disagree, the censored images, sequestered public
papers, unexpected visits from the Secret Service and so on.
And so should the media not parrot what the Pentagon says about
the current war, because such prettified accounts make us complacent
and preserve us in our fatal ignorance of what people really
think of us--and why--beyond our borders. And there's much more--about
the stunning exploitation of the tragedy, especially by the
Republicans; about the links between the Bush and the bin Laden
families; about the ongoing shenanigans in Florida--that the
media would let the people know, if they were not (like Michael
Powell) indifferent to the public interest.
In
short, the news divisions of the media cartel appear to work
against the public interest--and for their parent companies,
their advertisers and the Bush Administration. The situation
is completely un-American. It is the purpose of the press to
help us run the state, and not the other way around. As citizens
of a democracy, we have the right and obligation to be well
aware of what is happening, both in "the homeland"
and the wider world. Without such knowledge we cannot be both
secure and free. We therefore must take steps to liberate the
media from oligopoly, so as to make the government our own.
(Mark Crispin Miller, The Nation, January 7, 2002)
The
"Big Ten" media giants (click on company name to display
full company profile)
http://www.transnationale.org/anglais/dossiers/information/controle_4.htm
2. The Storyline Of The Bottomline
If
you've ever wondered why local television news is so often so
bad, the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) has the
answer. PEJ surveyed local news directors and rated local television
news in 14 cities. The first of a number of very troubling findings
-- 53 percent of the news directors "reported advertisers
try to tell them what to air and not to air and they say the
problem is growing." The pressure to do puff pieces is
constant and routine. The directors complained that consultants
hired to improve ratings tell the journalists what to and what
not to cover to maximize advertising revenue.
(TomPaine.com, January 16, 2002)
http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm?ID=4996
3. Advertisers Crave New Tricks To Hook Kids On TV News
Alessandra
Stanley reports how "television news executives are exploring
niche news programming" to brand their network deep into
the psyche of the younger audience that advertisers crave.
"In
a nobler version of the tobacco industry tactics, they hope
to lure younger people to their product and then hook them.
'The
idea is that you are investing,' David F. Poltrack, the CBS
executive vice president for research and planning, explained.
'You know as viewers age they watch more television news. You
want them to associate news with your brand.' " The September
11th terrorist attacks drew a massive young audience to TV news,
but that effect has dissipated. "The Buffy crowd, which
had briefly tuned in, has gone back to its old viewing habits,
much to the dismay of advertisers who are obsessed with
youthful viewers."
"Network
executives yearn to lower the median age for the news, which
is about 57 or 58 depending on the network, and replace Immodium
and Zoloft ads with ones for the iPod and Mountain Dew. If they
cannot attract youth to the current brand of news, they think
they can tailor news to be more attractive to youth."
(New
York Times, january 15, 2002)
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/15/business/media/15TUBE.html
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