The Media Monopoly by Ben H. Bagdikian Part 1 -- Preface ---------------------------------------------------------------- "Each year it is more likely that the American citizen who turns to any medium... will receive information, ideas, or entertainment controlled by the same handful of corporations, whether it is daily news, a cable entertainment program, or a textbook." Thus writes author Ben H. Bagdikian in the 1990 preface to his book. Bagdikian declares that the difference between our government and the corporate entity of business is getting harder and harder to delineate. "Corporate news media and business-oriented governments have made common cause." A historical parallel between the current situation and something similar from the past is cited by the author. "The mainstream news media postponed for more than fifty years full public awareness of the hidden dangers of the medically known threat to public health from tobacco... They did [this] to protect a major advertiser." And they are doing the equivalent obfuscations today, but this time on a grander scale. The increasing control of the media by a handful of corporate entities means that more and more it is they who control "what the average American reads, sees, and hears." And yet "...there is a close to total silence in the mainstream news on the social consequences of this concentration [of media control]." Our access to information is being controlled by persons whom we do not know, persons who are pulling the strings of the corporate puppet. "When the central interests of the controlling corporations are at stake, mainstream American news becomes heavily weighted by whatever serves the economic and political interests of the corporations that own the media." One of the dangers in all this is that "...the new corporate ethic is so single-minded about extreme fast profits and expanded control over the media business that it is willing to convert American news into a service for the affluent customers wanted by the media's advertisers instead of a source of information significant for the whole of society. The rewards of money profit through market control by themselves and their advertisers have blinded media owners to the damage they are doing to an institution central to the American democracy." ---------------------------------------------------------------- Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman "Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well." End part 1 The Media Monopoly by Ben H. Bagdikian Part 2 -- Introduction ---------------------------------------------------------------- "The dream of every leader, whether a tyrannical despot or a benign prophet, is to regulate the behavior of his people." -- Colin Blakemore ("Mechanics of the Mind") Today we live in a world which is changing so rapidly that receiving the best information possible is indispensable. If we are not getting the *entire* picture, if we are not getting unbiased information, then we are unable to make *informed* decisions. Bagdikian declares that "...ignorance of economic and political change is destructive of democracy and fatal to intelligent decision making." More than at any time in our history, we depend on the mass media to inform us about what is occurring, about the "news." It is the mass media which decide what *is* the news. "The mass media become the authority at any given moment for what is true and what is false, what is reality and what is fantasy, what is important and what is trivial." "Authorities have always recognized that to control the public they must control information." Thus, those in power have it in their interest to control the information. And yet, for "a realistic picture of society there is no such thing as a central authority." Reality has many angles and to centralize control over information limits our perspective on reality to a single angle or viewpoint -- that of whoever has power. "The Age of Enlightenment created a new kind of society... It acknowledged that the democratic consent of the governed is meaningless unless the consent is informed consent." Thus *information* was crucial in a democracy. In the United States, the first amendment sought to guarantee a plurality of viewpoints, a plurality of information. "Diversity of expression was assumed to be the natural state of enduring liberty." But unfortunately, "Modern technology and American economics have quietly created a new kind of central authority over information -- the national and multinational corporation. By the 1980s, the majority of all major American media... were controlled by fifty giant corporations." These powerful information czars can easily drown out attempts by the less powerful to put forth dissenting viewpoints. "The fifty men and women who head these corporations... constitute a new Private Ministry of Information and Culture." Bagdikian argues that "...while it is not possible for the media to tell the population what to think [at least not overtly, B.R.], they do tell the public what to think about." The permissable range of discussion is defined by the mass media. "What is reported enters the public agenda... [Thus,] More than any other single private source and often more than any governmental source, the fifty dominant media corporations can set the national agenda." This control over our information and ultimately of our lives by these corporate dinosaurs is not new. "When Fred Friendly resigned as president of CBS News in 1966 because the network refused to cancel a fifth daytime rerun of 'I Love Lucy' for a crucial Senate hearing on the Vietnam War, he was told that the loss of revenue from a delayed episode of 'Lucy' was intolerable to shareholders, who would not accept any decrease in net profits." Or again, more recently the chairman of the board of the largest newspaper chain, Gannet Company, told an interviewer, "Wall Street didn't give a damn if we put out a good paper in Niagara Falls. They just wanted to know if our profits would be in the 15-20 percent range." [When we see "commercials" on television, it becomes harder and harder to distinguish them from outright propaganda. Witness, for example, the string of Dow Chemical commercials ("Dow let's you do great things"). As Abbie Hoffman once said, "You see these commercials and you feel so relieved!" You want to exclaim, Wow! Thanks for helping, Dow!] B.R. "News and public information have been integrated formally into the highest levels of financial and nonjournalistic corporate control. Conflicts of interest between the public's need for information and corporate desires for 'positive' information have vastly increased." Although it is true that within the dominance of the fifty corporados controlling the media there still is *some* mixture of news and ideas -- still "there are also limits... The limits are felt on open discussion of the system that supports giantism in corporate life and of other values that have been enshrined under the inaccurate label 'free enterprise.'" Sure, these slaves of mammon will allow a controlled range of debate. But "when their most sensitive economic interests are at stake, the parent corporations seldom refrain from using their power over public information." "When fifty men and women, chiefs of their corporations, control more than half the information and ideas that reach 220 million Americans, it is time for Americans to examine the institutions from which they receive their daily picture of the world." ---------------------------------------------------------------- Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman "Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well." End part 2 The Media Monopoly by Ben H. Bagdikian Part 3 -- The Endless Chain ---------------------------------------------------------------- "For where your treasure is, there will be your heart also." -- Matthew 6:22 "Corporate leaders predict -- that by the 1990s a half-dozen large corporations will own all the most powerful media outlets in the United States." This is scary because of, among other things, "the striking similarity in the private political and economic goals of all of the owning corporations." Bagdikian gives numerous examples of the trend toward centralized control of the media. He cites the fact that "At the end of World War II... 80 percent of the daily newspapers in the United States were independently owned, but by 1989 the proportion was *reversed* [my emphasis], with 80 percent owned by corporate chains." [This centralized control over our information gives enormous power to what is essentially a *thing*. A corporation is not a human being. It is not several human beings. It is rather a technology whose only purpose is to make more and more money. A corporation has no heart, or rather it displays a "heart" only when this suits its primary purpose -- profit. B.R.] The mass media "is being reduced to a small number of closed circuits in which the owners of the conduits... prefer to use material they own or that tends to serve their economic purposes." The chief executive officers of the twenty-three corporations "that control most of what Americans read and see... [are] almost without exception... economic conservatives." The believers in this economic mythology "know which side their bread is buttered on." When their corporate interests are at stake "they use... [their] power, in their selection of news, and in the private lobbying power peculiar to those who control the media image -- or non-image -- of politicians." Without unrestricted and accurate information, democracy begins to fail. If citizens cannot make *informed* choices they will be led to *badly formed* choices. "In a democracy, the answer to government power is accountability, which means giving voters full information and real choices." "When the same corporations expand their control over many different kinds of media... the experience has been that the common control of different media makes those media more alike than ever... Cable, once thought to be a fundamental alternative to programs on commercial television... is increasingly an imitation of commercial television." Big Government and Big Corporations are increasingly intertwined. "The history of Big Government and Big Corporations is more one of accomodation than of confrontation... [Nixon and Reagan] both made extraordinary moves to support corporate concentration and increased profit-taking in the media; newspaper publishers overwhelmingly endorsed both Nixon and Reagan for reelection, and while in office President Reagan received stunningly uncritical coverage by the Washington news corps." The author stresses that this concentration of media control into the hands of a few CEOs of a small group of mega-corporations is a topic that is *verboten* in the mass media. "...the public, almost totally dependent on the media... has seldom seen in their newspapers, magazines, or broadcasts anything to suggest the political and economic dangers of concentrated corporate control." The corporados can especially exert a subtle control over our information by emphasizing some items more than others. "Most owners and editors no longer brutalize the news with... [a] heavy hand... More common is something more subtle, more professionally respectable and more effective: the power to treat some unliked subjects accurately but briefly, and to treat subjects favorable to the corporate ethic frequently and in depth." ---------------------------------------------------------------- Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman "Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well." End part 3 The Media Monopoly by Ben H. Bagdikian Part 4 -- Information as a Corporate By-Product ---------------------------------------------------------------- "One hand washes the other." -- Old Country Saying In the early 1970s Warner Modular, a minor subsidiary of Warner Communications, had as their publisher one Claude McCaleb. Mr. McCaleb was attempting to publish a small book entitled "Counter- Revolutionary Violence" by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman when, on August 27, 1973, he received a call from one William Sarnoff, chief of *all* Warner book operations. Sarnoff was worried that this book might be potentially embarrassing to the Warner conglomerate. "Was this another 'Pentagon Papers' case that would embarrass the parent firm? The answer was no, this was an analysis of public material by two established academics." Two hours later, Sarnoff called again. He ordered the publisher to hand-carry a copy of the manuscript to his office in New York. The next day, after Sarnoff had received the copy of the manuscript, McCaleb received another phone call. He was ordered to report to Sarnoff's office at once. When McCaleb arrived, "Sarnoff immediately launched into a violent verbal attack on me for having published CRV [Counter-Revolutionary Violence] saying, among other things, that it was a pack of lies..." According to McCaleb, "He [Sarnoff] then announced that he had ordered the printer not to release a single copy to me and that the... [book] would not be published." McCaleb pointed out to Sarnoff that "...at that very moment 10,000 of the books were coming off the presses." According to McCaleb, Sarnoff responded that "...he didn't give a damn." The books were destroyed. "In countries like the Soviet Union a state publishing house imposes a political test on what will be printed. If the same kind of control over public ideas is exercised by a private entrepreneur, the effect of a corporate line is not so different from that of a party line." Censorship is not always so explicit as in the McCaleb/Sarnoff example. "Most bosses do not have to tell their subordinates what they like and dislike. Or if such an explanation is necessary, it is not necessary to repeat the lesson." In August of 1982 Earl Golz, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, was fired "...because of a story Golz wrote that offended a major Dallas bank, the Abilene National Bank." In his newspaper story, Golz reported that "...the bank had loan problems so serious that it was in danger of failing." The chairman of the Abilene National Bank was enraged by the story and the paper fired Golz. Less than two weeks later "...the bank failed and federal examiners found that the bank had loan losses far beyond its assets." But Golz was never rehired by the Dallas Morning News. No reporter on that paper "... will have to be told for a long time what the boss expects. There will be no need for memorandums or spoken words. Subordinates, to be safe, may go even further in self-censorship than the boss requires. But no official intervention will show." There is a mythology amongst media people that there is no problem of intervention of owners into the content of the news. However this is not the case. "Bruce Ware Roche, in his dissertation 'The Effects of Newspaper Owners Non-Media Business Interests on News Judgements of Members of News Staffs,' lists numerous corporate interventions in newspapers." For example: * -- Walter Annenberg, owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer, "...routinely banished from the news the names of people he disliked, including people normally reported." * -- "When the Du Ponts owned the dominant newspapers in Delaware they regularly censored news stories or ordered emphasis in display depending on how the stories would affect family interests, actions so blatant that a distinguished editor resigned rather than comply." The most long lasting power of media giants is the power to create ideas and movements which reflect "...the strictly private desires of the media owner. Once public attention has been aroused, the media owner can pretend to be reporting a spontaneous public phenomena." For example: * -- In 1949, William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce, both heads of powerful media empires, were concerned about communism and the growth of liberalism in the U.S. They interviewed an obscure preacher named Billy Graham and converted him into "...an almost instantaneous national and, later, international figure preaching anticommunism. In late 1949 Hearst sent a telegram to all Hearst editors: 'Puff Graham.' The editors did." * -- The Hearst empire also helped create Senator Joseph McCarthy. In 1950, McCarthy made his historic "I have here in my hand a list of 205 names known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party" speech. As Hearst's son related in a subsequent interview, "Joe [McCarthy] gave me a call not long after that speech. And you know what? He didn't have a damn thing on that list. Nothing." Did Hearst put this stunning information into his newspapers after receiving McCarthy's phone call? No. "Instead, he formed a cadre of Hearst journalists and researchers... to provide McCarthy with as much help as possible to keep the anticommunist hysteria alive." This power of the media monopoly caused two negative effects on the quality of public discourse: 1) It allowed them to create the national atmosphere that they desired. 2) By choosing what issues to focus on, it had the effect of *de- focussing* on other issues. It had the effect "...of undernourishing society of other news and ideas necessary for informed democratic decision making." "The result of the overwhelming power of relatively narrow corporate ideologies has been the creation of widely established political and economic illusions in the United States with little visible contradiction in the media to which a majority of the population is exclusively exposed." "Some intervention by owners [in deciding what information the public will be bombarded with] is direct and blunt. But most of the screening is subtle... as when subordinates learn by habit to conform to owners' ideas. But subtle or not, the ultimate result is distorted reality and impoverished ideas." ---------------------------------------------------------------- Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman "Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well." End part 4 The Media Monopoly by Ben H. Bagdikian Part 5 -- Desanctifying the Corporation "The WORLD has no friends." -- Sign in the newsroom of Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the *New York World* "It is a great paper. But it has one defect." "What is that?" "It never stands by its friends." "A newspaper should have no friends," Pulitzer replied sharply. "I think it should," the judge answered just as sharply. "If that is your opinion," Pulitzer said, "I wouldn't make you one of my trustees if you gave me a million dollars." ---------------------------------------------------------------- "The sacred cows in American newsrooms leave residues common to all cows. But no sacred cow has been so protected and has left more generous residues in the news than the American corporation." Since World War I, the media has by and large favored corporate life. "Most of the mass media depicted corporate life as benevolent and patriotic." However, the truth began to break through in the last half of the twentieth century. "When industry's ghost of pollution and disease materialized in the last half of the twentieth century the problems drew attention... to the organizations that owned and operated most of industrial civilization -- the great corporations." "Corporate unease became sharper when a president whom corporations considered their own, Dwight D. Eisenhower, left office in 1961 warning against the bloated power of what he called 'the military-industrial complex.'" The truth had begun to shine through the cracks in corporate America. But the corporados fought back. Through their power they were able to soften the legal consequences of their actions. They were also protected by their special positions in government. "After laws are passed or before regulations are designed, outside advisory committees sit with government leaders to help shape official actions." Because the positions on these advisory bodies are largely occupied by corporate hacks, they can defang reform before it is implemented. "In universities, as in government, corporate values have steadily and quietly become dominant... Corporate executives are the largest single group represented on governing boards of colleges and universities." In the public schools, "Free classroom materials are produced by 64 percent of the 500 largest American industrial corporations." Anyone who imagines that these "free" materials are unbiased is in for a shock. "The materials concentrate on nutrition, energy, environment, and economics, almost all supplied by industries with a stake in their own answer to the problems posed in the materials." So, the "ghosts of pollution and disease" were countered by massive corporate PR and undue influence on supposedly independent institutions. Whatever criticism which does survive corporate obfuscation has tended to be short lived. Criticism which survives corporate mass brainwashing is either not reported at all by the mass media or is neutralized by the media's criticism of the critics. "The standard media... had always been reliable promoters of the corporate ethic. Whole sections of newspapers were always devoted to unrelieved glorification of business people... in 'news' that is assumed to be dispassionate." Corporate causes became editorial causes. The most commonly suppressed news items were stories "involving corporations... reported in minor publications but not given serious attention in the major media. The integration of corporate values into the national pieties could not have been established without prolonged indoctrination by the main body of American news organizations." In the years after 1970, "mounting public anger at some corporate behavior does occasionally find expression in print and on the air." More and more chinks in the corporate armour began to appear. Still, there was "no significant criticism of the corporate system, simply reporting of isolated cases, but for the first time there was a breach in the almost uniform litany of unremitting praise and promotion of corporate behavior." The corporate types fought back. One of their counter-strategies was that of donating large amounts of money to help elect/re- elect candidates favorable to the corporate line. "[In] 1980 they elected a national administration dedicated to wiping out half a century of social legislation and regulation of business... But the corporations reserved their greatest wrath for the news media." Through the use of business connections, through the use of massive advertising campaigns, and through the use of threats of withdrawal of advertising dollars the giant corporations fought back the swelling tide of reality. In addition, "corporate leaders could invoke against the media that peculiar American belief that to criticize big business is to attack American democracy." ---------------------------------------------------------------- Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman "Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well." End part 5 The Media Monopoly by Ben H. Bagdikian Part 6 -- From Mythology to Theology "No Gannett newspaper has any direct competition." -- Allen Neuharth, chairman of Gannett Company "Neuharth Says 1-Paper Towns Don't Exist" -- Headline in a trade magazine ---------------------------------------------------------------- The massaging of reality into a mythology which benefits the image of a special group is an occurrence as old as history. "Turning life's natural mixture of the noble and ignoble into unrelieved heroism is done by those who, like editors of the 'Soviet Encyclopedia,' believe it is their religious duty to mislead the public for its own good." However, there is one important difference nowadays in this shaping of reality into self-advantageous mythology. "[The] high priests who communicate mythic dogmas now do so through great centralized machines of communication [i.e. the mass media]... Operators of these systems disseminate their own version of the world." The special groups which control the mass media are able to overwhelm their often exhausted and/or passive audience with the constant repetition and reinforcement of certain themes. For example, consider the stereotype of the typical journalist as being radical and antibusiness. "[The] stereotype of the journalist as radical and antibusiness does not match the facts. An authoritative study by Stephen Hess showed that 58 percent of Washington correspondents consider themselves 'middle of the road' or 'conservative' politically." Or again, consider the fostering of the mythology of the corporation as all around "hero" and "good citizen." So-called "corporate advertising... constitutes printed and broadcast ads designed not to sell goods and services but to promote the politics and benevolent image of the corporation... [e.g. some of the Dow Chemical ads, Commonwealth Edison ads, etc.] The ideology-image ads as a category of all ads doubled in the 1970s and are now a half-billion-dollar-a-year enterprise." The purpose of these ideology-image ads is to present "... the corporation as hero, a responsible citizen, a force for good, presenting information on the work the company is doing in community relations, assisting the less fortunate, minimizing pollution, controlling drugs, ameliorating poverty." In addition, corporate dollars are used for "explanations of the capitalistic system, including massive use of corporate books and teaching materials in the schools, almost all tax deductible." During the so-called "energy crisis" of the 1970s, the Mobil Oil Company began running a type of ad known as an "editorial ad." These ads by Mobil Oil came to be known in the newspaper trade as "the Mobil position." These ads had the format and style of an actual editorial but were in fact paid advertisments. One of these ads declared in 1979: "Can oil companies be trusted to put additional revenues into the search for new energy supplies? History says yes." "Sadly [according to Bagdikian], history says no." The top twenty oil companies have historically used their profits *not* to search for new energy supplies but rather to purchase firms outside of oil production and distribution. In the 1970s and 1980s, Mobil was investing in its so-called "search for new energy supplies" by purchasing "...such assorted non-oil companies as Montgomery Ward, Container Corporation of America, restaurants in Kansas City, [and] condominiums in Hong Kong... Mobil today indulges its profits... by printing 'Playboy' magazine, 'National Geographic,' and Bantam and Random House paperback books." [At this point something strange has happened. I am at page 72. The next page says page 105. Pages 73-104 *aren't there*. There has been *no* obvious tearing out of pages and I purchased this book brand new. Draw whatever conclusions from this that you wish. At any rate, I will continue this synopsis in part 7, starting at page 105. B.R.] ---------------------------------------------------------------- Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman "Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well." End part 6 The Media Monopoly by Ben H. Bagdikian Part 7 -- The High Cost of Free Lunches "With no ads, who would pay for the media? The good fairy?" -- Samuel Thurm, senior vice-president, Association of National Advertisers ---------------------------------------------------------------- Newspaper publishers are "...engaged in a strange act. They sell their boiled pine trees [i.e. newspapers] for about one-third less than they pay for them." The newspaper publishers pull off this magic through the help of advertising fees. "Americans do not get their newspapers and magazines at less than cost. They do not get their radio and television free. They pay for everything." Americans pay for the advertising which supports these media by paying *extra* for the goods being promoted in the advertisements. And ironically, "All of this is never made clear to them in the communications they most depend on -- the advertising-supported newspapers, magazines, and commercial broadcasting." **************************************************************** * Daily Papers (averages) * * * * 1940 -- 31 pages, 12.5 pages ads (40%), 18.5 pages "news" * * 1980 -- 66 pages, 43 pages ads (65%), 23 pages "news" * **************************************************************** Note in the above chart that most of the "news" pages added between 1940 and 1980 "...were not 'news' but were in a grey area between real news and ads, an area called 'fluff' in the trade. Most fluff is wanted by advertisers to create a buying mood." This blurring of the distinction between "news" and advertising is becoming more and more of a problem. More and more, "Revenue Related Reading Matter [fluff]" is pretending to be hard news. "Heavy sections of newspapers -- like fashions, food, and real estate -- were created as advertising bait. Sometimes the material in the special sections is genuinely useful and is produced by professional journalists. More often it is a mixture of light syndicated features and corporate press releases." And, according to Bagdikian, "Fluff continues to spread." You pay money for your newspaper, but publishers are not much interested in what type of paper you want. Or rather, they are much more beholden in their attitude toward their advertisers than they are towards their reading public. "Every serious survey, including those by the newspaper industry itself, makes clear that readers want more hard news." But publishers have consistently ignored their readership's wants in favor of submitting to the demands of their advertisers. "In the security of their domination of the market, newspaper publishers have been converting newspapers into agencies for merchants." The history of advertisers' relationship with various media shows a consistent pattern. The normal sequence of events is for the advertiser to start out having a minimal influence and to wind up having a huge influence over the content of what is disseminated. For example: *** "Ads in early magazines were segregated in the back pages since editors assumed they were an intrusion on the reader. But in the 1890s... advertising agencies insisted that ads be moved from the back of magazines to the front... The influence of advertising on magazines reached a point where editors began selecting articles not only on the basis of their expected interest for readers but for their influence on advertisements. Serious articles were not always the best support for ads. An article that put the reader in an analytical frame of mind did not encourage the reader to take seriously an ad that depended on fantasy or promoted a trivial product." *** "When radio became a nationwide medium in the 1920s it was the fastest-growing industry in national history... The most popular stations were noncommercial... Millions of Americans were tuning in to university lectures, taking correspondence courses by radio, and listening to drama, music, and debates." "As the 1920s progressed so did commercials." Because large quantities of radios had already been sold, the educational stations were no longer necessary as stimulants to the sale of radio receivers. Commercial stations "...used their influence in government to force educational stations to give up popular frequencies and broadcast times... In a dozen years the powerful system of noncommercial broadcasting in the United States had been destroyed... By the 1930s, radio made all its money from advertising and created its programs to support advertising." *** "In the first years of mass television, whole programs were produced and controlled by single advertisers." These were the "golden age" programs, so-called because "...they were coherent and had unobtrusive commercials." Then, after the spectacular success of a lipstick company (Hazel Bishop) when it bought a "spot advertisement" on television that was not attached to any particular show, "Companies, dreaming of similar leaps in sales... rushed to buy commercial time." The creation of "spot advertising" and consequent elimination of single-sponsorship of a program caused a subsequent change in the contents of t.v. programs. "Networks created a new kind of program that was less emotionally involving than plays by Chayefsky, new programs that created a 'buying mood.'" As the amount and length of commercials grew, so did complaints from the viewing public regarding the proliferation of these ads. The media monopoly replied that radio and television broadcasting were free, "...that advertisers gave the public something for nothing." But of course, this particular truism is never debated in the mass media. "[It] has become an article of faith that mass advertising is essential to the preservation of a free press and 'free' broadcasting." "Radio and television are not free... An increasing number of economists find that mass advertising is a major instrument by which big firms keep prices artificially high... mass advertising restrains competition by preventing new products from new companies from reaching the public." In addition, we all pay for these mass advertisements in higher prices at the store. This is demonstrated, for example, in the lesser cost of generic products compared to that of heavily advertised name brands. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman "Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well." End part 7 The Media Monopoly by Ben H. Bagdikian Part 8 -- One Giant Ad "What i'd like to know is how you Americans can successfully worship God and Mammon at the same time." -- Sir John Reith, director general of the BBC ---------------------------------------------------------------- In 1835, James Gordon Bennett, founder of the "New York Herald" began accepting advertisements from one "'Doctor Brandreth,' a quack who sold phony cure-all pills." Along with the profusion of Brandreth ads, there began also to appear "...a steady diet of 'news' stories, presuming to be straight reporting... recounting heroic cures effected by none other than Dr. Brandreth's pills." "Nine months later, when Brandreth canceled his advertising contract, Bennett, in print, called the good doctor a 'most impudent charlatan' who 'deceived and cheated,' something any moderately honest reporter could have written from the start." "Modern corruption is more subtle. At one time or another, advertisers have *successfully* demanded that the following ideas appear in programs around their ads": *** All businessmen are good or, if not, are always condemned by other businessmen. *** All wars are humane. *** The status quo is wonderful. *** Clergy are perfect. *** All users of cigarettes are gentle, graceful, healthy, youthful people. *** All financial institutions are always in good shape. *** The American way of life is beyond criticism. Major advertisers have successfully insisted, *at one time or another*, "...that these specific ideas be expressed not in the ads but in the ostensibly 'independent' news reporting, editorial content, or entertainment programs [of the various media. The public] do not know that these messages are planted by advertisers. They are not supposed to know. They are supposed to think that these ideas are the independent work of professional journalists and playwrights detached from anything commercial." Especially insisted upon by the corporate sponsors of our mass media is that criticism of the idea of free enterprise or of other basic business systems is absolutely off-limits. "Some reporters often criticize specific corporate acts, to the rage of corporate leaders. But the taboo against criticism of the system of contemporary enterprise is, in its unspoken way, almost as complete within mainstream journalism and broadcast programming in the United States as criticism of communism is explicitly forbidden in the Soviet Union." In 1965, the FCC held hearings to find out how much influence advertisers had on the noncommercial content of t.v. and radio. Albert N. Halverstadt, general advertising manager of Procter & Gamble, "testified that the company established directives for programs in which [P&G] would advertise." As given by Mr. Halverstadt, examples of these directives were as follows: " Where it seems fitting, the characters in Procter and " " Gamble dramas should reflect recognition and acceptance " " of the world situation in their thoughts and actions, " " although in dealing with war, our writers should min- " " imize the 'horror' aspects.... " " " " There will be no material on any of our programs which " " could in any way further the concept of business as " " cold, ruthless, and lacking all sentiment or spiritual " " motivation. " "Halverstadt testified that these policies were applied both to entertainment programs... and to news and public affairs documentaries." "It is sobering that these demands are made of a medium reaching eighty million homes for six and a half hours every day." Bagdikian maintains that these pressures from the advertisers on the content of what is broadcast and read by Americans are continuing to this day. He further is of the opinion that the consistent superficiality of most television programs can be traced to pressure from advertisers. "Corporate demands on television programs underlie what many consider the most grievous weakness of American television -- superficiality, materialism, blandness, and escapism." In television's "golden age," before the advent of spot advertisements, in the days of single-sponsor programs, serious shows enjoyed popular success. "Erik Barnouw in his definitive history of American broadcasting writes: " That this 'marvelous world' fascinated millions is " " abundantly clear from statistics. These plays... held " " consistently high ratings. But one group hated them: " " the advertising profession... Most advertisers were " " selling magic. Their commercials posed the same prob- " " lems that Chayefsky drama dealt with: people who " " feared failure in love and business. But in the " " commercials there was always a solution as clear-cut " " as the snap of a finger: the problem could be solved " " by a new pill, deodorant, toothpaste, shampoo, shaving " " lotion, hair tonic, car, girdle, coffee, muffin recipe, " " or floor wax. " "Serious programs remind the audience that complex human problems are not solved by switching to a new deodorant. Contrary to the network characterization of audiences, a more sophisticated presentation of human affairs was accepted enthusiastically by television audiences during the 1950s... If, in the midst of this, a commercial resolved serious human conflicts with a new brand of coffee, the commercial appeared for what it was -- silly." ---------------------------------------------------------------- Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman "Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well." End part 8 The Media Monopoly by Ben H. Bagdikian Part 9 -- Democracy and the Media "Experience is kaleidoscopic: the experience of every moment is unique and unrepeatable." -- James Britton, "Language and Learning" ---------------------------------------------------------------- "In the United States, voters cast ballots for individual candidates who are not bound to any party program except rhetorically, and not always then... [Thus] No American citizen can vote intelligently without knowledge of the ideas, political background, and commitments of each individual candidate." But it is impossible for *mass* media to adequately cover "...the issues and candidates in every one of the 65,000 local voting districts. Only locally based journalism can do it, and if it does not, voters become captives of the only alternative information, paid political propaganda, or no information at all." >From 1900 to 1950 the number of urban places almost tripled while at the same time the number of daily newspapers dropped. Thus, there was less information of a local character available. In addition, "Pursuit of advertising changed the versatility of American print media. It reduced the media's responsiveness to reader desires. Publishers became more dependent on advertising revenues than on reader payments." "In 1900 each paper meant more to its readers because the news dealt more closely with the reader's community and because each paper was more likely to meet its readers' political and social interests... Papers in 1900 were more accountable to their readers because their financial fate rested on reader loyalty." "Responsiveness of each paper to its own social group was not an unmitigated advantage for society... Papers' special orientations often increased divisions within the community. But it is not clear that this was worse than the apathy resulting from a bland news system that avoids partisanship in a society whose political system is designed to be partisan. Nor is it clear whether the homogenized news for large areas serves citizens who are asked to make basic political decisions on a specific, local level." Radio and television have also adopted the bland doctrine of homogenized news. This is especially due to their "even greater dependence on advertising [than newspapers]." "Newspapers neutralized information for fear that strong news and views pleasing to one part of the audience might offend another part and thus reduce the circulation on which advertising rates depend... Newspapers, and later broadcasters, wanted all potential *affluent* consumers... Consequently, if a group as a whole were poor... papers wished to avoid news of them and their issues. Problems affecting lower-income communities generally did not become news until they exploded and therefore affected affluent consumers." "American journalism began to strain out ideas and ideology from public affairs, except for the safest and most stereotyped assumptions about patriotism and business enterprise. It adopted what two generations of newspeople have incorrectly called 'objectivity.'" "'Objectivity' placed overwhelming emphasis on established, official voices and tended to leave unreported large areas of genuine relevance that authorities chose not to talk about. It accentuated social forces as rhetorical contests of personalities... ['Objectivity'] strained out interpretation and background despite the desperate need for them in a century wracked by political trauma. Recitations of facts about world wars, genocides, depressions, and nuclear proliferation are useful but inadequate; mere recitations imply that all facts are of equal value." "The safest method of reporting news was to reproduce the words of authority figures... [and] most authority figures issue a high quotient of imprecise and self-serving declarations. Physical crime, natural disasters, and accidents were politically safe, which accounts for the peculiar American news habit of reporting remote accidents regardless of their relevance to the audience. News became more official and establishmentarian." The emergence of broadcasting in the 1920s did not ultimately create an alternative news system. "Instead, broadcasting... simply read the printed news in truncated form. Radio and television newscasts, at their longest, provide less information than half a newspaper page." The television industry found "from the beginning that they had to maintain maximum attention among a wide disparity of consumers." The answer that television found to this problem was to rely heavily on "the twin sovereigns of attention-getting" -- sex and violence. One of the reasons that sex and violence became the common denominator in television programming was that they were not too politically controversial. Any social controversy in the reliance on these twin attention-grabbers was offset by using them [at first] in a not too obvious way. "Sex had to be used obliquely... so it permeated television by innuendo, in themes of entertainment, in selection of actresses and actors, in double meanings in commercials, and in sophisticated appeals to the subconscious. Violence was easier to stress, given the prevalence of crime as a standard ingredient in printed news and the place of guns and violence in the mythology of the country." "The social and psychological costs of these television twins [sex and violence] are incalcuable. The Surgeon General's studies have shown that television violence increases actual violence and acceptance of violence in children." ---------------------------------------------------------------- Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman "Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well." End part 9 The Media Monopoly by Ben H. Bagdikian Part 10 -- Consumer Modification Technology "Social science and psychological techniques have been added to television's arsenal for conditioning human behavior." -- Ben H. Bagdikian, author of "The Media Monopoly" ---------------------------------------------------------------- "To counter public resistance to television and advertising, the manipulation of emotions has become more sophisticated. Social science and psychological techniques have been added to television's arsenal for conditioning human behavior... Most TV ads appeal to the emotions. The manager of public opinion research for General Electric says that 'much of response to advertising is right-brain.'" One firm uses "infrared eye scans to record rapid eye movement in response to test images in television commercials, advising clients on elements of ads like the most effective juxtaposition of sex objects, for example, a woman in a bikini and the brand name of the advertised product." Another firm uses "electrodes attached to the fingertips of human subjects to see what symbols in commercials... create the most arousal in connection with a product." According to Chuck Blore, a partner in a well-known advertising firm, "Advertising is the art of arresting the human intelligence just long enough to get money from it." "If that is true, it arrests a great deal of intelligence. It is estimated that the average American child has seen 350,000 commercials by age seventeen and, in the words of Billie Wahlstrom of the University of Southern California, these commercials are 'the propaganda arm of the American culture.'" "In order to maintain sanity and coherence in the midst of this clever and insistent bombardment [of advertising messages], each individual has to erect a sensory screen that instantly, often unconsciously, detects the incoming signal and rejects it... [But] the advertising creators know this, so to penetrate the screen that every human being erects to protect the senses, ad agencies need a constant supply of new symbols, images, and ideas." "The sheep's clothing of sex, beauty, a trusted personality, or a semi-sacred symbol is needed to encase the wolf of the sales pitch... ['The target', i.e. the consumer] does not recognize a new image and, before it is recognized as the same old message in a new guise, the unidentified lying object has penetrated the protective screen and made a hit on the deceived mind." "The reclothing of ads in ever-new symbols has contributed to the devastating attrition in the lifespan of symbols in modern culture... Contemporary society is filled with images, some in a constant state of change like television, or in continuously altered states, as in radio... Advertising is a source of symbol manipulation unknown to earlier generations. The advertising industry spends $1,000 per household in order to break through the resistance of human senses and sometimes of human intelligence... As viewers and readers get used to the massively displayed symbols, the symbols change to the latest idea or personality or national emotion until it, too, in days or weeks, becomes meaningless, part of the continuous and deliberate slag heap of mass communications." "Perhaps the most easily measured damage of the media battle for consumers is inflicted on the American political system." The political process has molded itself so as to fit the form required by the mass media. "The insertion of emotional commercials into programs had become an accepted practice for a variety of products [e.g. perfumes, laxatives, deodorants, etc.]... A commercial for a political candidate could fall easily into the accepted brief interval in regular programs. A carefully taped, meticuously edited political presentation with all the immediacy and simulated sincerity of a commercial, but without serious content, could be projected into homes where viewers would be most vulnerable." So, television electioneering "deals mostly with imagery and emotional manipulation engendered by the five-second and thirty- second commercial... [It has] almost eliminated coherent debate. A whole generation of voters has not heard serious content in election campaigns." "The inappropriate fit between the country's major media and the country's political system has starved voters of relevant information, leaving them at the mercy of paid political propaganda that is close to meaningless and often worse. It has eroded the central requirement of a democracy that those who are governed give not only their consent but their informed consent." ---------------------------------------------------------------- Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman "Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well." End part 10 The Media Monopoly by Ben H. Bagdikian Part 11 -- Mass Media Without Masses "By 1990, publishers of mass circulation daily newspapers will finally stop kidding themselves that they are in the newspaper business and admit that they are primarily in the business of carrying advertising messages." -- A. Roy Megary, publisher, Toronto Globe and Mail ---------------------------------------------------------------- "There is a steady decay in public loyalty to the media. There is hostility or indifference toward modern newspapers and the same fate is hovering over television." Looking back, it was in the years 1965-1980 that American mass media came under maximum control of the corporados. "...[Corporate] ownership changed the form and content, the strategies of operation, and the economics of newspapers... Newspapers and other media bought by large corporations as investments [came] under new pressures for maximizing profits." The group having the most disposable income were those between the ages of 18 and 49. Advertisers were eager to reach this group. "Broadcasters cannot keep the nonaffluent and elderly from watching or listening to their programs, but they design the content to attract younger, affluent viewers. Newspapers control the readership by not reporting significantly on neighborhoods of low-income and elderly populations..." This "unwanted American population" who are being more or less ignored by the media is not small. "In 1984, families with less than median combined income... constituted 50 percent of all American families... [The] unwanted population of the 'wrong ages' -- younger than eighteen and older than forty-nine -- constitutes 54 percent of Americans; those older than forty-nine make up 26 percent of the population." But the advertising-driven media is not interested in reaching the maximum amount of readers but rather in reaching the maximum concentration of dollars. Short-term profits "...are now imperative in the major media almost without regard for the future of media institutions... Wall Street investors look for dividends... and are not moved to behave today by considerations of the more remote future. Advertisers demand immediate sales based on the appearance of their ads..." "In the race for short-term profits, the American newspaper is no different from other large American corporations in the last half of the twentieth century. But the newspapers represent an institution which, unlike steel mills and automobile companies, affects the roots of the democracy... Magazines similarly have adopted a strategy that enhances immediate high profits at the expense of long-term stability." Television also follows this pattern. The result of the frantic pursuit of the dollar by t.v. executives "...is to design programming that will serve the split second of attention-getting rather than humanistic substance that will stay with the viewer; the ratings race serves the advertiser's needs, not the audience's." "Besides producing greater emphasis on soft content detached from serious news, the concentrated corporate control of [the media]... also strained out extreme political writing... Newspapers began carrying a variety of political columns, but none, right or left, strayed very far from centrist positions and none was permitted to stress anticorporate ideas. It was a clear demonstration of neutralizing the news to make papers more efficient carriers of advertising. But it produced social sterility and silence on fundamental forces behind major news events." "The consequences for American politics have been serious. One assumption of the 'objectivity' doctrine of reporting is that every side of a dispute has an equal and opposite side. No 'extreme' views are considered legitimate, though the characterization 'extreme' is often applied to politics considered normal in other democracies. Anything beyond the status quo is in danger of being seen as either communist on the left or fascist on the right." Thus, in order to create a facilitating ambience for salesmanship, the news is emasculated. The "news" becomes trivialized. When this happens, when "...the daily news, in print and broadcasting, is perpetually cast in terms of largely physical events related to personalities and devoid of political and social meaning, [the public has no]... way of identifying, analyzing, and assessing the value of alternative social forces. The social and political sterility of American reporting leaves most citizens without a coherent view of politics. In an inevitable circle of indifference, this leaves most citizens without a sense of involvement in the news. Political news becomes personal melodrama carefully strained of explicit political and social significance." "The news media -- diluted of real meaning by apolitical and sterile context, homogenized with the growth of monopoly, overwhelmingly more of a service to merchants than to the audience, and filled with frivolous material -- are a threat to their own future but also to the body politic." "When sterility of news writing fails to relate political and social events to real forces in society, it produces something worse than 'nothingness.'... [The news] is left as isolated fragments..." We can make nothing of the present moment. "And if people can make nothing of the present moment they tend to remain static and bewildered, left at the mercy of whoever acts with power..." However, "The product of the news media... has begun to lose its vigor as an institution. When the news is designed to exclude a third or a half of the population, it has sacrificed much of its standing as a democratic mechanism. And if it delivers accounts of events without relating them to the real world it has begun to fade as an important force in any society." ---------------------------------------------------------------- Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman "Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well." End part 11 The Media Monopoly by Ben H. Bagdikian "The Media Monopoly" is published by Beacon Press in Boston. Help support the work of Ben H. Bagdikian by purchasing this book. Part 12 -- The Growing Gap "In the 1950s... it [General Electric] launched Ronald Reagan as a national political spokesman by paying him to make nationwide public speeches against communism, labor unions, social security, public housing, the income tax, and to augment the corporation's support of right-wing political movements." -- Ben H. Bagdikian, from his book "The Media Monopoly" ---------------------------------------------------------------- In 1986, General Electric acquired RCA. Through this acquisition, it became the owner of NBC. Among other things, this means that it no longer needs to purchase or plead for favorable "PR." "Now, if it desires favorable treatment it no longer has to plead with at least one major American news organization. It owns one." The question arises as to if General Electric experienced a major criminal conviction, how well would NBC report that news? Would NBC "proceed to produce a documentary on criminality... with General Electric as an obvious example? If it were disclosed that the company paid no income taxes during three years of multi- billion profits... would the network [NBC] produce a documentary on inequities in the national tax system?" One hand washes the other. The odds are that there would be some degree of bias shown. "American mainstream news is still heavily weighted in favor of corporate values, sometimes blatantly, but more often subtly in routine conventions widely accepted as 'objective.'" These "routine conventions" include the following: 1) Overdependence on "official" sources of news. 2) Lack of social context for the "facts" in the news. 3) A "...pattern of selective pursuit that results in some subjects regularly developed in depth and others of equal or greater importance systematically avoided." 1 -- Just Credentialed Facts ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ "Facts supported by important figures form the bulk of contemporary news... [This] overemphasis on news from titled sources of power has occurred at the expense of reporting 'unofficial' facts and circumstances. In a dynamic and changing society, the voices of authority are seldom the first to acknowledge or even to know of new and disturbing developments." "Where there are not genuinely diverse [i.e. not just 'official'] voices in the media the result inevitably is an overemphasis on a picture of the world as seen by the authorities, or as the authorities wish it to be." 2 -- Fear of Context ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ "Simple recitation of data seldom lead to public comprehension. Most naked facts are comparatively meaningless. Context is crucial." For example, in the late 1980s the fact of the failures of various banks *was* being reported. What was *seldom* being reported was "...the ominous growth in annual bank failures and what this could mean for the national economy. Both advertiser and owner want the audience to remain in an accepting attitude toward both the news and the advertising. The result is unnecessarily bland and unintegrated information..." While it is true that *some* interpretation of the facts does sometimes occur, The "...doctrine of just-the-facts is so strong that with rare exceptions the interpretations are done with self- cancelling circumlocutions in order to remove any impression that political and economic judgements are being made." 3 -- Dig Here, Not There ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ In the vast amount of facts which can be reported, it is inevitable that some choice must be made as to which facts are reported and which are ignored. "Yet, current professional standards give journalists little or no power to question systematic failures to pursue some important subjects and overemphasis on other subjects. Reporters take for granted that they have the right to resist an order to write a falsehood. There is no comparable convention for resisting the avoidance of important issues or the pursuit of self-serving ones." [As the case of the General Electric ownership of NBC illustrates, it is at the very least quite likely that at some times influence has been brought to bear by the parent company on its subsidiary network. This filtering of the news means that there is a "rose colored window" through which the light of truth must pass before it reaches the public. B.R.] Underneath the self-serving nature of corporate influence on the various media, "...there is a disturbing separation of most major media from the true nature of their country's population, a separation that threatens not only the future usefulness of the media, but the vitality of the American political process." ---------------------------------------------------------------- Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman "Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well." End part 12 The Media Monopoly by Ben H. Bagdikian "The Media Monopoly" is published by Beacon Press in Boston. Help support the work of Ben H. Bagdikian by purchasing this book. Part 13 -- To Undo Excess "So distribution should undo excess, and each man have enough." -- King Lear, 4.2 ---------------------------------------------------------------- [Note: The structure of this chapter is partitioned. Each section does not readily flow into the next section. Therefore, I have not attempted to simulate a continuity in this synopsis. Each partition will be divided by a string of ":::::::::::::". B.R.] :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: "The deadening effect of cross-media ownership is clear in the sad loss of the original dream of cable. The great promise of cable... was copious channels for each city, organized as a public utility." "Cable would become a common carrier... guaranteed a reasonable profit in return for an agreed-upon level of public service. The cable operator would be in the business of renting cable time with an almost unlimited supply of channels available." "Under these conditions, there would be the possibility of 'narrowcasting,' devoting numerous low-cost channels to smaller audiences... It would not be necessary to attract a maximum, generalized audience, profitable for mass advertising, which is the dynamic that now produces the bland and imitative programming of through-the-air broadcasting. This new direction was the promise of modern cable..." "The original dream for cable is all but lost... [For] most communities the original idea has been reversed, thanks to the lobbying that produced changes in congressional law and policies of the [FCC]. When these changes were being considered, most newspaper and broadcast news was silent on the profound consequences of the changes. It is not coincidental that most cable systems are owned by companies who already are owners of other media..." :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: "The 1988 presidential elections revealed how sterile the national political dialogue has become. A major cause is the mass media's treatment of politics, specifically the failure of their reporting to reflect the full range of ideas and programs that exist in American thinking and expertise." The narrowness and "paucity of ideas in national politics" can be traced at least in part to the limited time allowed for issues in television reporting and advertising. "Television is the main medium of national and regional electioneering, mostly ten-second to thirty-second campaign commercials that are devoid of content." "In politics and where socially important information is at stake, the public should become more aware of the lively alternative press that exists regionally and locally, and support those publications that speak to their needs. The alternative papers often pursue subjects and air opinions squeezed out of the mainstream local press. Some of their investigative reporting regularly stimulates the first public awareness of flaws in the institutions the mainstream media tend to protect..." :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: "To give citizens a choice in ideas and information is to give them a choice in politics: if a nation has narrowly controlled information, it will soon have narrowly controlled politics." "Today the integrity of news and other public ideas depends on corporate self-control, on the hope that the large corporations that now control most of the media will never use that power as an instrument to shape society to their liking. The history of those who hold great power inhibited solely by self-control is not reassuring." Our "news" is a narrowly focussed aspect of reality. We are by no means getting the full picture. No small group, "...certainly no group with as much uniformity of outlook and as concentrated in power as the current media corporations, can be sufficiently open and flexible to reflect the full richness and variety of society's values and needs." "The answer is not elimination of private enterprise in the media, but the opposite. It is the restoration of *genuine* competition and diversity." [my emphasis] "If the concentration is too great it ought to be diluted; it would seem to be common sense that if one corporation has too many outlets for the country's economic and social health, the corporation ought to divest itself of the excess." However for this to occur "...the public requires adequate information." Yet the sad thing is that the public has not gotten this information because "...the media have never permitted news and commentary to make their corporate power a subject of common knowledge, let alone of public debate." There is a chance to reverse the power of the mass media. The chance "...lies in public awareness of the danger. But because the media are not going to make an issue of their own power, the initiative must come from others." "Concentrated control of the media is not the most urgent danger facing society...But the ability to cope with larger problems is related to the peculiar industries we call the media, to their ownership and the nature of their operation... In a world of multiple problems, where diversity of ideas is essential for decent solutions, controlled information inhibited by uniform self-interest is the first and fatal enemy." "The object of reform is not to silence voices but to multiply them, not to foreclose ideas but to awaken them. For it is in diversity and openness that the genius of the United States can flower." ---------------------------------------------------------------- Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman "Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well." End part 13 The Media Monopoly by Ben H. Bagdikian "The Media Monopoly" is published by Beacon Press in Boston. Help support the work of Ben H. Bagdikian by purchasing this book. Part 14 -- Afterword ---------------------------------------------------------------- "Modern communications have become a technological window through which the various tribes of the human race catch glimpses of each other... A major force in the penetration of [the former barriers between the different 'tribes' of the world] has been nongovernmental, free-enterprise mass media, run for profit or without direct control of nationalistic or ideological authorities... [But unfortunately we are] moving in the direction of substituting one set of dangers for another. Instead of control by governments, public opinion is increasingly controlled by a small number of private corporations." New worldwide empires "...have already emerged. Their control of the global mass media expands almost weekly. Their names are seen in headlines as actors in a financial competition that is now entered only by mammoth corporate organizations, backed by the largest multinational banks and their politically compatible national regimes. They already command international audiences larger than any political leader in history." For example, "Time Warner, formed by merger of Time, Inc. and Warner Communications, is the largest media corporation in the world. It has more technical communication power than most governments." "The new global giants are doing more than expanding their control over the technological instruments that issue news, information, and entertainment. They and their subsidiaries are also gathering up world copyrights of earlier information and popular culture... Much of what used to be free in libraries or inexpensive for the average consumer is rapidly growing in cost, thanks to exclusive corporate ownership." "The new global media firms did not grow in a vacuum. First, they became dominant within their own countries, a process usually aided by the mutual accomodation between powerful media corporations and powerful politicians. A political regime gives the large corporation favorable tax and regulatory favors, and experiences official amnesia regarding antitrust laws. In return, the politician or political regime is given either favorable treatment or is spared what might otherwise be hostile treatment or, worse, no treatment at all." Just as these global media firms did not grow in a vacuum, so too they do not *exist* in a vacuum. "Dominant mass media firms have become so large that their financing, credit, interlocked directors, and sometimes their ownership intertwine them with the world's largest banks and investment houses. That troika -- global media corporations, the multinational industries that advertise, and the worldwide banking establishment -- represents a new power in world politics and economics." -- Materialism -- There is "...another American tradition [besides the 'technical skill and positive accomplishments of American broadcasting'] that the rest of the world is now inheriting and could do without. Underlying the growth of commercial television around the world has been the promotion of materialism... Television, even more than print, is best at selling goods that are marginal to basic needs -- cosmetics, for example, rather than education." "Television is most effective at selling competing goods that are only marginally different... That is why commercial television so insistently creates fantasy worlds, not just in commercials, but in the associated programs that must create what television officials call a 'buying mood.' The fantasy is needed to associate some desired goal -- heightened sexuality, business success, popularity, power -- with possession of a superficial physical object, like a particular brand of soft drink, or perfume, or cigarette." Because greater and greater sales must be achieved, the "...regular repurchase [of the same or similar products] has to be stimulated by creating ever-changing fashions, so that goods still physically useful will be discarded as socially unacceptable. The pervasiveness of television commercials thus spreads the ideology of materialism and fashionable consuming..." -- Noncommercial Television -- "An enemy of commercial television is noncommercial television, since those audiences reduce the audience for commercial television. Noncommercial broadcasting also reminds the public that there is an alternative to the heavy doses of sex-and- violence, fantasy advertising, and programs designed primarily to create a 'buying mood.' Noncommercial broadcasting can deal with public issues and controversies in ways avoided by commercial broadcasters whose advertisers, understandably, do not wish their products associated with public controversy." It is sad to note that in some countries "Conservative governments, responding to banking and private media pressures, and in pursuit of their free market and privatization policies, have instituted plans to increase commercial channels and simultaneously reduce the funding and independence of the existing, better, noncommercial systems, such as the BBC in England, the provincial public systems in West Germany, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the United States." -- Conclusion -- "The alternative to preventing giantism in the media is to depend on the social responsibility of the corporations... [Social responsibility on the part of the corporations] would prevent the spread of cancer and heart disease to the youth of the world by transnational television commercials for cigarettes. Social responsibility by the media giants and their clients would not continue the degradation of children's programs or promote sex and violence... [Corporate social responsibility] would restrain rampant materialism." However, it is clearly useless to ask competing corporations to show social responsibility. Milton Friedman has written: "Few trends so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by our corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their shareholders as possible." So for Friedman and his followers, social responsibility does not extend beyond the pursuit of greater and greater profits. "Friedman's view of social responsibility is dear to the heart of most major businesspeople. The mammoth corporations that now dominate the mass media in the United States and, increasingly, throughout the world, seldom say it as incautiously as their favorite economist, but they are pursuing it with growing ferocity." "We know enough to fear governments that possess unaccountable power. And we know how to prevent creation of private power that possesses the same traits, and to do it by business principles that leave each corporation free to publish, broadcast, and record whatever it wishes, and provide the public with real alternatives. But if that freedom exists without true competition in the marketplace of ideas, and if each media corporation is permitted to wipe out all effective rivals and dominate its field, these corporations become as unaccountable as a dictatorial censorship." ---------------------------------------------------------------- Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman "Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well." End part 14 of 14 End of series.