Reykjavík Grapevine - 27.06.2003, Síða 26

Did you ever hear the one about the
politician, the actress and the White
House dog? Well, the year was 1992,
the location Washington. Casper, the
politician, was being indicted for pissing
all over the constitution, a scandal
officially known as Irangate. Candice,
the actress, was starring in the now long
forgotten Murphy Brown and achieved
the ultimate accolade of celebrity
when her single mother character was
criticised by the high-minded if illiterate
Dan Quayle. And then there’s Millie the
dog, not just any old mutt but famed
canine companion to the Bushes George
and Barbara, whose collected capers
was making itself at home in the upper
reaches of the New York Times best
seller list.
Our intrepid trio were duly put to the
public recognition test with predictably
hilarious results. When asked to identify
the personalities, a whopping 89% of
those surveyed eyeballed the sitcom
star. Weinberger will have been relieved
to find that a secretary of defence
indicted in the biggest political scandal
since Watergate jogged the memories
of less than 17% of the nation while (yes
you’ve guessed it) a scary 86% correctly
identified the dog.
Of course recent American history is
littered with weird and wacky examples
of a TV nation gone mad. Enduring
media myths from the Reagan era, trees
cause pollution, welfare costs more than
the military etc., became gospel truths
for millions of Americans and provided
hours of amusement for the rest of us.
Hilarious as these misconceptions
may be, they inevitably raise more
serious questions about how well
our media serve us and their ability,
and indeed, willingness, to act in the
interest of the public. To accusations of
trivialisation of news, misinformation and
good old-fashioned barefaced lies, your
average world-weary media watchdog
may reply: Was it ever thus! An equally
pertinent question, as we enter the new
millennium, might be; was it always this
bad? Does the 21st century herald a
truly altered fourth estate so tainted
as to be barely worthy of the name? It
is certainly a puzzling paradox that in
an era where the quantity of news and
information is unprecedented, access
to genuinely independent sources are
ever harder to find and the public, as the
survey suggests, seems more ignorant
and uninformed than ever.
Follow the money
Like any business or social entity this
loose conglomeration of information
outlets that we like to call the media has
evolved dramatically since its infancy in
the 16th century, when the advent of the
printing press made a star of one Martin
Luther and helped provoke the biggest
religious rumpus of the century. Today
the media is, of course, a multimillion-
dollar industry employing huge numbers
around the world. To see what makes
it tick we simply take a tip from our
overpaid Premier League footballers
and follow the money, to discover just
who owns what in media-land.
In the U.S. and most other western
democracies, where the term free
press is still invoked without irony,
ownership and control of the media
industry have undergone a revolution
in the last 50 years or so. At the end of
the Second World War, the printed word
and radio were the principal sources of
information for the average citizen. For
all its faults the mainstream media could
be considered reasonably independent if
only through its diversity of ownership.
In the U.S, for example, while corporate
chains absorbed an increasing number
of dailies, 75% of newspapers were still
independently owned, often by a single
individual or run as a family business.
The corporate invasion of radio
broadcasting had certainly begun but
had yet to extend its tentacles into local
and provincial networks. This process
accelerated startlingly in the fifties in all
areas of the media and a fast-forward
to the new millennium reveals a very
different story.
At last count, courtesy of Ben
Bagdikians The Media Monopoly, there
were in the U.S. 1787 daily newspapers,
11000 magazines, 9000 radio stations,
1000 TV stations, 2500 book publishers
and 7 major movie studios. About
25,000 thousand media entities in all.
When the often labyrinthine task of
tracing each individual newspaper, radio
or TV station to its ultimate corporate
parent is completed, a startling, not to
say disturbing, fact emerges. About 16
or 17 supremely wealthy multinational
corporations (give or take a corporate
merger or two) own and ultimately
control almost the entire media
network in the most powerful country
in the world. While the U.S. certainly
represents the most extreme case, a
similar pattern is discernable across
the western democracies from Italy to
Iceland.
Now call me an alarmist but surely
this solitary fact alone has truly grave
consequences for a genuine free press
and the public’s right to know the full
facts. To many readers, the idea that
the mainstream media’s de facto role
in society is often less the dissemination
of unbiased information into the public
domain and more the maintenance of the
hegemony of dominant power groups,
may not exactly be, if you’ll pardon the
pun, news. However, as conservative
media moguls and their highly paid
anchormen and women, the likes of Dan
Rather and Barbara Walters, would feign
astonishment and indignation at the
suggestion that their news output often
better serves the corporate interests of
their parent company than the public, a
case must be made.
He who pays for advertising calls
the tune
So how exactly does the corporate
absorption of the news-media effect
its ability to function as an instrument
of free and unfettered expression?
A central problem is that corporate
ownership media inevitably creates
insoluble conflicts of interest where the
loser is often the public’s right to fair and
accurate information.
Back in the mists of time when
advertising was in its infancy, as hard
as it may now be to believe, most
newspapers actually covered a large
portion of their costs through the
cover price, leaving editors in the
enviable position of being able to base
investigative and editorial copy largely
on the basic facts to hand. In the 21st
century, ads constitute over 90% of a
magazine or a newspaper’s revenue,
mostly from large companies or their
subsidiaries, many with bottomless
marketing budgets. In the case of
television this figure is 100%. In other
words, the average media entity is part
of a corporate giant, largely dependent
on other corporate giants for its
revenue and ultimately its survival. This
state of affairs begs some important
and, at least in the opinion of this
correspondent, rhetorical questions. Can
we really expect honest and balanced
reporting on any issue from military
spending and industrial relations to tax
reform and poverty from media outlets
whose owners and powerful clients have
a vested interest in framing the debate
on these very same issues? Who does
the corporate media ultimately serve, its
paymasters or the truth?
Of course it would be absurd to sug-
gest that corporate kingpins from the
likes of General Electric take a direct
personal interest in the editorial line of
the Wisconsin Sentinel or the Rhode
Island Record. The process is a subtler
and more tacit one. The ability to with-
draw a big advertising order can act as
an unspoken but powerful censor. A sim-
ple case of he who pays for advertising
calls the tune. Under tacit pressure from
corporate bosses and large advertisers,
producers and editors quickly learn what
to pursue and what to ignore. Take the
issue of tobacco. In the U.S.A cigarettes
kill on average about 500´000 people a
year while crack cocaine takes about
3000 lives annually. While major net-
works never tire, it seems, of running
sensationalist stories about the menace
of illegal drugs, stories focusing on the
considerably greater menace of a legal
one are a rarity. A situation that suits
Laurence Tisch, tobacco magnet and
owner of C.B.S. just fine and one not
entirely unrelated to the hundreds of
millions of dollars the major networks
receive from tobacco companies each
year.
If it bleeds it leads
In the modern corporate media no
aspect of output is sacred. The news
has to pay its way in terms of ratings
and ultimately advertising revenue just
like Frasier, Friends and Monday night
football. In recent years TV producers
have found real life violence packaged as
entertainment to be a ratings winner and
dirt cheap to boot. Absurd and obscene
series like Greatest Ever Police Chases
or World’s Most Amazing Videos only
increase the pressure to produce news
as entertainment. In an atmosphere of
such cutthroat competition, high-minded
ideals about journalistic integrity and
editorial responsibility are, as they say in
Brooklyn, strictly for the birds.
The result is a news media often
obsessed with violence, sex, celebrity
and above all trivia. All of which
ultimately leads to the Millie syndrome.
Less a case of outright censorship
and more what Jeff Cohen, founder
of F.A.I.R., describes as “selective
misinformation”. It produces a viewing
public, almost 90% of whom can identify
a dumb celebrity mutt but where less
than two in ten recognised the politician
who sold stolen arms to an oppressive
fundamentalist Muslim state to fund a
covert illegal terrorist war.
The archaic age, gender and racial
profile of the industry plus a glaring
absence of any mildly left of even centrist
opinion in terms of representation on
popular current affairs programmes,
helps to muddy the journalistic water still
further. Basic facts fed through these
WASPish filters emerge on the other side
in a form that often reinforces rather
than questions the worldview as defined
by the powerful establishment groups
and upon whose hegemony the fourth
estate could reasonably be expected to
act as an important constraint.

Never reveal today what can be
concealed until tomorrow
Were hoary old colonialist Napoleon alive
today, he would be truly impressed by his
prescience with regard to the workings of
the modern corporate press. Bonaparte
would have made a fine media guru or
spin-doctor long before such terms
were invented. In answer to a question
regarding the prospect of hushing up
some inconvenient facts from the French
public, Napoleon once remarked that it
was not always necessary to suppress
the news, merely to delay it until it didn’t
matter anymore.
From the early days of Vietnam to
the recently conducted Gulf conflict this
tactic has, in collusion with governments
and their militaries, been the corporate
medias stock-in-trade. Manipulation of
news output takes the form of distorting
and delaying facts, suppressing
information and sometimes, if needs be,
telling plain old porkies. The full facts, or
in the case of a complete fabrication, the
real story, trickles out months or even
years later. A supreme example of this
tactic was the recently fought gulf war.
Before the war the major TV networks,
especially those whose parent company
stood to gain directly from conflict, were
happy to parrot the official but baseless
Bush line “That pesky Saddam I just
know he’s got them there weapons
hidden somewheres around here, I
just know it” or words to that effect.
A genuinely combative and probing
press might have gone to the trouble
of investigating and reporting the wealth
of evidence suggesting that Saddam,
no longer at least, possessed MWDs.
This our mainstream media with a few
honourable exceptions conspicuously
failed to do. Sensational evidence like
the coalitions most prized defector,
one of Hussein’s estranged sons-in-law,
claim that Iraq’s biological weapons
programme had been terminated was
downplayed and ignored until after the
war had begun. Equally scurrilous was
the constant linking of Bin Laden and
Hussein, transparent scare mongering
by the bush administration eagerly
lapped up by a compliant press when all
available evidence showed they shared
nothing but mutual hatred. In these
and other deceptions, many so called
respectable and recognised journalists
willingly connived; for betrayal of
journalistic integrity in the propaganda
service of the military industrial complex
is rewarded, not punished, in corporate
media culture.
An excellent case in point is Dan
Rather airing of phoney reports from
Afghanistan in the eighties, appears not
to have impeded his steady rise through
the ranks of CBS. A successful career
built largely on slavish adherence to the
official line. On the other hand journalists
who dare to buck that line can find it
detrimental to their job prospects.
As part of their ongoing military and
financial support of the Salvadorian
death-squad dictatorship in the 80s,
the U.S. military, as well as supplying
money and arms, undertook training
of local militias. In 1982 a massacre
of hundreds of women and children by
one of these U.S trained battalions was
reported by Ray Bonner a New York
Times reporter based in El Salvador.
JOH
N
BOYCE
BYarticle
The advent of mass advertising has destroyed
the independence of the media, which in market
societies is responsible to the advertisers in the
same way that state run media is responsible to the
government in dictatorships, argues John Boyce. Of
course, none of this applies to Grapevine, which
firmly believes in the kindness and committment to
truth of its sponsors (do I get my check now?).
- the reykjavík grapevine -26 june 27th - july 10th, 2003 - the reykjavík grapevine - 27june 27th - july 10th, 2003
THE MEDIA
Of course, recent American history is
littered with examples of a TV nation gone
mad.
Iceland inc.
In 1991 the U.N. World Report revealed that 347 spectacularly wealthy individuals
owned more than the poorest 47% of the world’s population, a modest 2.8 billion
people. In a country the size of Iceland, however, about a dozen or families own
everything worth owning on the island. Often referred to as the Icelandic mafia
or the Octopus, this cosy cabal has recently and grudgingly admitted two new
members; Johannes Jonsson, founder and owner of Bonus, Iceland’s hugely
successful discount supermarket chain and Jon Olafsson whose ownership of radio
stations, cinemas and several subscription based TV channels confirms his position
as a leading media mogul.
Along with these pay-to-view channels there is the national, state sponsored channel
Sjonvarpid and, of course, our newest arrival Skjar Einn a free, solely advertising
funded station. Bargain basement broadcasting and run on a shoestring, it’s the
television equivalent of K-Mart and like K-Mart, largely filled with cheap American
produce. Icelandic demographics being what they are, the broadcasting business
is a risky one and all channels save the national one are deeply in debt.