“Knowledge makes man unfit to be a slave”- Frederick Douglass
We live in a country considered the most powerful country on earth, yet why is it so difficult to get any actual information, especially from outside our border? Not to mention what’s going on inside this country. Could it be because the news we rely on to learn about what’s happening in our world is basically in the hands of commercial enterprise?
Giant media corporations such as Time Warner, News Corps, Disney and so forth are the ones who get to decide what is news, what is newsworthy, and what is not newsworthy.
What the press is actually pushing is distortions, lies, and lack of balance.
In America, the public tends to know more about sex scandals and Hollywood celebrities than they know about economics, the environment, history and world events.
This is by design.
A design to control your imagination and your ideas, regardless of what side you fall on or your overall feelings on politics in general. This is a profound crisis of Democracy. You cannot choke off discourse and have a free society.
“When men yield up the exclusive privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon”- Thomas Paine 1776
One quick glance at your television and the news correspondent should show all there is to know, reporters wearing clothing and gear branded with corporate logos. Logos of companies with human rights violations that are so extreme that their name is used as a verb for harsh conditions and worker abuses in the countries were their sweatshops reside (Yes, we are referring to Nike, a company with 10.4 billion annual revenue who pays their workers on average 16 cents an hour and have been known to tape the mouths shut of employees caught talking and uses shoes to hit slow moving workers.)
How can you trust a reporter covered in corporate logo brands? Reporters who proudly display the fact that they are shills.
These are the fundamental kinds of conflicts of interest that result in censorship and narrow debates. They directly come from the fact that we have made historical choices to allow corporations to own and control our media. This is far removed from the original idea of this country.
This country, believe it or not, was founded on the concept that if you gave citizens the information they needed they could govern themselves. The founders gave citizens the fundamental rights to free press.
Freedom of press is the only way people outside of power can keep the government from becoming an empire, to stop militarism, corruption, secrecy, and cronyism. That was the function of freedom of press.
“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”- Thomas Jefferson
As corrupt and slimey as it’s become, there was a reason why journalism is the only profession explicitly protected by the U.S. constitution. They were the ones who were supposed to be asking the critical questions, the ones that were to hold those in power accountable.
One of the first steps our new government took was to encourage the distribution of independent news through subsidies. Subsidies that did not discriminate against content of the newspapers. This was one of America’s great revolutionary contributions.
Simply put, it is information that is power, it is information that frees us. For when people get information, it is then when they can decide what to do.
“There are laws to protect the freedom of the press’s speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press”- Mark Twain
Today in America this has become deeply distorted. For all intent and purposes, the media is how we have conversations today in society. It is how we learn about the world, how we learn about one another.
Now we are seeing the range of debate constrained because there may be many things that citizens of a democratic society may need to know about what private corporations/interest groups may not be interested in telling them.
Just as newspapers were once the “hope” of democracy, it was mass media that became it’s “hope” in the 20th century.
“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”- Malcolm X
Nowadays we think of Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tik Tok as big deals. Imagine what it was like when places like rural Oklahoma could listen nightly to broadcasts from New York for the first time! Quickly it became apparent that control over this media was going to be social control.
With ad revenue pouring in, corporate networks pressured congress to uphold profit as the basis for American broadcasting. This was publicly owned property and the idea that we would turn over this scarce resource of these airwaves to a handful of private interest groups to make money advertising to us caused many Americans to protest.
In 1934 congress passed the Communication Act sealing the future of America’s broadcasting as a for profit system. Though regulations against monopolies were set in place, congress gave away the rights to government property in a huge form of corporate welfare that is staggering.
No individual should have such dominance of our media that they could effectively define discourse, but when Ronald Reagan became president a great transition of thought came.
“Government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem”- Ronald Reagan
Any concern to any question as on how to create a good media system was to get the government out of the way. So, in order to restructure media ownership Reagan removed the regulations.
This idea to let the bull loose on the free market and everything will be fine lead to:
-Relaxed advertising limits during children’s programming.
-Raised limits on how many stations one company could own.
-Equal airtime to political candidates no longer required.
The reality of this is that it allows giant corporations to come in and devour everything. The conglomerate with it’s defense contracts, theme parks and other commodities doesn’t see news as central and essential to democracy. Their main interest is making profit. News is another form of advertising and agenda pushing.
One merger symbolized the takeover of mass media, General Electric and R.C.A. Electric. This merger was allowed to go through despite G.E.’s long history of violating industry laws and practices such as:
-deceptive advertising of light bulbs
-fraudulent nuclear missile contract
-$30 million in fines for defrauding the Defense Department
-money laundering in the sale of military jet engine
-toxic contamination of the Hudson River
-human experiments in nuclear testing
-unfair debt collection practices
-guilty of price fixing
Few remember that prior to his political career Ronald Reagan was a paid celebrity spokesman for General Electric.
By moving to Wall st. you create the scenario for the need to minimize products to maximize profit. This will result in less writers in your newsroom and more than likely the ones who remain are the ones fine with shilling out for money to repress information.
While we are by no means anti-capitalist, Capitalism is not the best means for judging what is good for society.
“These large conglomerate companies contribute to political campaigns and they expect to get something for their money. Deciding on their own and for their own purposes the news we see and hear.”- Dan Rather, American journalist, former evening news anchor
In the mid 90’s congress began to draft new media legislation, and media conglomerates sold the fantasy that if they were allowed to own more media they could make better media.
Media corporations need favorable policies that allow them to grow and make more money. Politicians need the media to give them the airtime that they couldn’t exist without.
Who’s left out of this deal? The public.
In 1996 Clinton signed the Telecom act rendering the fantasy into reality, allowing companies to come through and purchase as many TV stations and newspapers as they wished; and a massive wave of mergers swept through the industry.
When these mergers happened, local broadcasters couldn’t compete, effectively knocking them out of the game. Thereby, reducing outlets that may report differently than the approved narratives.
All we are getting now in this high tech digital age is static. A veil of distortion and lies, of misrepresentation, and half-truths that obscure reality.
“I operate under the assumption that the mass media will never be accurate. ...It operates with the objective to simplify and exaggerate, which is exactly what Walt Disney told his cartoonists.”- Michael Crichton, author
In times of war the press loses all critical distance. The result of this ultimately is the dissemination of propaganda.
Take 9/11 for an example: as tragic as it was, it also gave the presiding administration the perfect reason to invade Iraq. To link Saddam Hussein to the attacks, they turned to the intelligence community. Remember this is not an inductive process, it’s deductive. You decide to go to war, then you find justification. Cue defectors coming out of the woodwork to give “exclusives” to U.S. news outlets with tales of nukes hidden under palaces and other various facilities stockpiling weapons.
The success of this propaganda campaign ultimately relied on one outlet, The New York Times. The NYT is considered the intellectual and political opinion leader in America and they suck the teat of the U.S. government in war like no other, placating the military intelligence complex.
With the mainstream media convinced of the necessity for war, the cause was taken to the world stage. Here, the most brilliant propaganda maneuver of all was made.
Colin Powell’s absolutely fraudulent presentation to the U.N. security council. Powell’s accusations were based on much of the fabricated information that was presented by the media and their “defectors”. As soon as he was finished, the press began falling over themselves with no hard evidence that there was a definitive case for war, just the sounds of the giant echo-chamber of their creation. A creation that creates public perception in the United States.
“It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda on a societal scale”- Jaques Ellul
Is it possible wars are started through mainstream media? By the press getting too close to the government, an inter-breeding of media and the military industrial complex begins.
The results are thousands of lives lost for a lie so easily uncovered but wasn’t allowed in the biggest news outlets.
What you have is private corporations making a profit off killing. They push for more war while limiting discussion on if war should continue. They bring the pro-war democrat vs. the pro-war republican and have them partake in extremely limited debates.
The rapid consolidation of media across broadcast, film, and publishing created an institution where instead of a democratic media system that the founders anticipated with independent newspapers and independent owners nationwide, you have a few dictatorships controlling the nation’s papers. No longer do we get a Thomas Paine, we get a Rupert Murdoch.
Rupert Murdoch’s News corps owns 1000s of influential media outlets worldwide. When asked if he thought his media company helped shape the agenda of war and how it is viewed he answered:
“No, I don’t think so. I mean, we’ve tried”- Rupert Murdoch
News Corps and others have nearly devoured every single independently managed newspaper within the U.S. That is quite dangerous as it puts its business and political interest above all.
Every aspect of our lives from what we buy, what is sold to us, who produces it, all these things are connected. It’s not only a monopoly on wealth, it’s a monopoly on information.
“The process (of mass media deception) has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt…. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary”- George Orwell
