Subject: Article from The Nation
Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2002 09:58:51 -0500
From: The E-mail Bag
January 7, 2002
What's Wrong With This Picture?
by Mark Crispin Miller
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 wildernesses 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 steps 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 se "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 9/11, 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 footage 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.
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Related: Media Age
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