bottom down

I wrote this post for publication in the website Sidewalk Philosophy. Thought I’d also post it here:

Hallucinations. Visions. Distortions of reality. And those are just SOME of the words you can use to describe the state of main stream media today. And yet it’s all around us. It inundates us with facts. It lures us into believing that we are being given all the information. And due to the sheer mass of information we receive (A study by the Berkley University in 2003 shows that there is 800MB of information for every person on the planet which is growing at an exponential rate of 30% each year) many of us believe that we DO have all the facts. 24 Hour news channels, an increasing number of newspapers and magazines, information documentaries, and news sites on the internet have helped strengthen this perception. But just like in the case of most hallucinatory drugs, this perception is an illusion.

The information we receive, while unimaginable in terms of sheer quantity is controlled to a degree that is also in its own way – unimaginable. Most of the information we see comes to us from very few sources, which are governed mostly in terms of corporate interest. McChesney quotes Christopher Dixon, media analyst for the investment firm PaineWebber, who calls this phenomenon “the creation of a global oligopoly.”

Corporate control and commercial objectives are increasingly becoming the hallmarks of mainstream media across the globe. News is a commodity – packaged prettily and wholly dependant on market forces.

It’s all about what the public wants to know, what the controlling corporates want the public to know… but certainly not about what the public needs to know. This is why so much happening around us is ignored. And in a world where what we perceive as real is only what is represented to us (the concept is that if it doesn’t happen on Television then it hasn’t happened at all), many voices that need to be heard and issues that need to be aired are being ignored. CEO of the Walt Disney Company Michael Eisner perhaps said it best in an internal memo where he made the following declaration: “We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.”

Welcome to vertical integration of the media folks! It has made its mark and it’s all around us. We are being censored and we don’t even know it! Our access and right to information is now OWNED. Let me emphasize this: By a very few people. And we only know what they want us to. To quote a study by Bagdikian (2000):

In 1983, fifty corporations dominated most of every mass medium and the biggest media merger in history was a $340 million deal. … [I]n 1987, the fifty companies had shrunk to twenty-nine. … [I]n 1990, the twenty-nine had shrunk to twenty three. … [I]n 1997, the biggest firms numbered ten and involved the $19 billion Disney-ABC deal, at the time the biggest media merger ever. … [In 2000] AOL Time Warner’s $350 billion merged corporation [was] more than 1,000 times larger [than the biggest deal of 1983].

Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, Sixth Edition, (Beacon Press, 2000), pp. xx—xxi

This is collaborated by McChesney who points out that in the first half of 2000, the volume of merger deals in global media, Internet, and telecommunications totaled $300 billion, triple the figure for the first six months of 1999, and exponentially higher than the figure from ten years earlier. He states that “the logic guiding media firms in all of this is clear: get very big very quickly, or get swallowed up by someone else.”

As seen by these studies, In the US, most information is controlled by just eight major companies. And before we ask how this can be possibly be relevant to us, think about the fact that it is these very same companies that are controlling global media as well. Murdoch anyone? Murdoch has satellite TV services that run from Asia to Europe to Latin America. His Star TV dominates in Asia with thirty channels in seven languages. News Corporation’s TV service for China, Phoenix TV, in which it has a 45 percent stake, now reaches forty-five million homes there and has had an 80 percent increase in advertising revenues in the past year. And this barely begins to describe News Corporation’s entire portfolio of assets: Twentieth Century Fox films, Fox TV network, HarperCollins publishers, TV stations, cable TV channels, magazines, over 130 newspapers, and professional sport teams. (See McChesney for more details)

The same situation reigns closer to home, among non global players albeit on a much smaller scale. Take India, which has recently seen massive corporate influence on journalism especially over the last few years. Newspapers are sold at insanely low rates, the costs of which circulation and subscription could never cover. The advertisers rule and most alternative news sources cannot hope to compete. So the “Other” voice has effectively been knocked out of the loop and the mainstream media essentially promotes the interests of the advertisers. And this basically sums up the case in Sri Lanka as well. Think about it. Who controls the private media? The Maharajas, the Edirisinghes, the Wijeweera’s. the Wickremesinghe’s… and a lot of what they report is decided in terms of the business they can garner.

This phenomenon is catching on worldwide and can be seen across the various mediums of journalism. The Corporates are controlling us and what is frightening is that we don’t realize that what we are doing is blindly and willingly imbibing ideologies of commercialisation and commodification. It’s the product that matters – and the information deemed relevant is only that which helps to sell it. mcChesney for one, argues that “Economic and cultural globalization arguably would be impossible without a global commercial media system to promote global markets and to encourage consumer values.”

So here we are… all consumers… a potential market. Therefore news that can damage, news that can shed light on conspiracy, news that makes us stop for that second and say hang on! WHAT? are being sacrificed for the news that is relatively harmless. Oh we are given an illusion of choice. Within this ideology, debate is encouraged… the other voice is heard… but only in terms of its place in relation to and within the larger (and more superior) point of view. And the terrifying truth is that the few commercial establishments that own the news company are in a position to ignore whatever news they deem unsavoury and make it go away. And stuck as we are in the well constructed cocoon that they have woven around us we are none the wiser. We blindly watch what we are shown. Read whatever is written… and believe.