Jabou:

In response to your mail on the above subject, you might find the article
below worth reading. It was written in October 2001 by Professor Robert
McChesney, the well-known media critic.

Ebrima Ceesay

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POLICING THE UNTHINKABLE


By Professor Robert W. McChesney



The global media are integrating and their ownership is concentrating in
fewer hands. This process threatens to undermine democracy. We need more
independent and non-commercial media to challenge the corporate stranglehold
on the culture.


Over the past two decades, as a result of neoliberal deregulation and new
communication technologies, the media systems across the world have
undergone a startling transformation. There are now fewer and larger
companies controlling more and more, and the largest of them are media
conglomerates, with vast empires that cover numerous media industries.
Media industries are barely competitive in the economic sense of the term.
The giants do compete ferociously, but they do so under the rules of
oligopolistic markets, meaning they have far greater control over their fate
than those in truly competitive markets. It also means that it is extremely
difficult, if not impossible, for newcomers to enter these markets as viable
players.

By most theories of liberal democracy, such a concentration of media power
into so few hands is disastrous for the free marketplace of ideas, the
bedrock upon which informed self-government rests. The key to making markets
work in the consumers’ interest is that they be open to newcomers, but the
present conglomerate-dominated markets are not even remotely competitive in
the traditional sense of the term.

This is not a new problem for capitalist media. In fact, in the United
States, it was nothing short of a crisis a century ago, as one-newspaper
towns and chain newspapers terminated competition in the American newspaper
market, then the primary purveyor of journalism. Journalism at the time was
still quite partisan, whence the political crisis that resulted from virtual
monopoly. It was one thing for newspapers to be opinionated when there were
several in a community and it was relatively easy to enter the market. It
was quite another thing to have opinionated journalism when there were
monopoly newspapers and they stridently advocated the political positions of
their owners and major advertisers.

"We report, you decide"

The solution to this problem was the birth of professional journalism, based
on the idea that news should not be opinionated. To cite the slogan for
Murdoch’s US Fox News Channel: "We report, you decide." In theory news would
be produced by trained professional editors and reporters, free of the
political bias of owners and advertisers, who would concede control over
editorial matters to the professionals.

Readers could trust the news, and not worry about the paucity of local
newspapers. Of course, professional journalism was hardly neutral – it
tended to volley within the walls of elite opinion and call that neutrality.
Even after professionalism became the rule in the United States by
mid-century, it was never pristine. But it did serve to make the
concentrated ownership of media appear less significant than it would
otherwise have been.

In the past 15 years, the autonomy granted professional journalists has come
under sustained attack. As many of the major newspaper chains and TV
networks have been gobbled up – at high prices – by the giant conglomerates,
the traditional deal between owners and journalists has made less and less
business sense. Why, accountants ask, should a firm’s news division generate
less profit than its film studio, its music division, or its TV networks?

Accordingly, newsrooms have increasingly been subjected to commercial
rationalisation: reduced staff, less controversial and labour intensive
investigative reporting, and more easy-to-cover but trivial stories about
celebrities, crime and royal families. News is increasingly pitched to the
upscale audience desired by advertisers; in the United States, business news
has therefore become a huge part of the overall news, while labour news has
fallen from view. The measure of the decline in professional journalism is
indicated in every major study of journalists over the past decade.
Anecdotally, one need only read the laments of former journalists to see
that something fundamental has taken place.

New media provides competition?

With the decline of professionalism as a protection against concentrated
control over the media, a new reason to keep things as they are has emerged:
the internet will set us free. New digital technologies are so powerful that
they will provide a platform for a massive wave of new media competitors who
will slay the existing giant corporate media dinosaurs. A golden age of
competition is returning.

It is true that the internet is changing a great deal about our lives. In
certain media industries, especially music and book publishing, it is
forcing a thoroughgoing re-evaluation of the reigning business models. But
the evidence so far is emphatic: the internet is not going to launch viable
commercial competitors to the existing media giants. Their existing market
power trumps the possibilities of the new technologies. There is a plus side
for internet journalism; people can access news media from across the
planet. But sustaining doing good journalism requires resources and
institutional support. There is nothing in the technology or the market that
provides either of these to internet upstarts.

Not behind closed doors

A key reason the internet will not set us free is the thoroughly corrupt
nature of communication policy making in the United States, and, to varying
extents, worldwide. New technologies – often developed by public subsidy –
could be used to provide for a new sector of commercial and non-commercial
media if public policies were so inclined. But they are not, and they are
not for a reason: important licences and subsidies are routinely doled out
to media corporations behind closed doors – in the public’s name but without
the public’s informed consent.

In the United States, for example, the premier licences for monopolistic
rights to broadcasting frequencies on the scarce airwaves have been provided
at no charge to a handful of corporations including Disney, Viacom and News
Corporation. A trained chimpanzee could make millions with VHF TV licenses
in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Someone with the cunning of a Rupert
Murdoch or a Sumner Redstone can do far better than that.

This points to the daunting task that faces those who wish to challenge the
corporate media status quo. The nature of our media industries results not
from some natural "free" market but from explicit government policies and
subsidies. As the media firms have grown larger, their power over government
policymakers has turned into a vice-grip. They alone control the means of
communication, meaning they can shape the manner in which debates over media
policy are disseminated and understood.

Global media system

The internet is not all that has changed in the past decade. There has
emerged a global commercial media system during the same period. Twenty
years ago, one thought of media systems as national phenomena first, with
imports a secondary consideration. Today this is reversed. We must see the
global system first, then make allowances for differences between nations
and regions. This global media system is an indispensable part of the rise
of global neoliberal capitalism. Indeed, it would difficult to imagine
"globalisation" without the emergence of the international commercial media
system. Through these systems transnational firms have access to
unprecedented markets, broadcasting content that inevitably supports the
values necessary to keep the system ticking.

At the top of the global media system is a tier of fewer than ten
transnational giants – AOL Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, Vivendi
Universal, Sony, Viacom and News Corporation – that together own all the
major film studios and music companies, most of the cable and satellite TV
systems and stations, the US television networks, much of global book
publishing and much, much, more. By 2001 nearly all of the first tier firms
rank among the 300 largest corporations in the world, several among the top
50 or 100. As recently as 20 years ago, one would have been hard-pressed to
find a single media company among the 1,000 largest firms in the world. Or,
to consider the growth of the media sector in another manner, consider the
AOL-Time Warner merger, the largest in business history. That deal, valued
at around $160 billion, was nearly 500 times larger than any media deal in
history.

The global media system is rounded out by a second tier of 60-80 firms. Most
of them are powerhouses in North America or Europe, but several are based in
Asia and a few in Latin America. These firms are competitors in some markets
but are often collaborators, partners and customers in other markets. They
are all wed to the neoliberal deregulatory model that has permitted them to
grow wealthy and profitable. The governments of the United States and its
trusty sidekick, Britain, have dedicated themselves to the advancement of
these firms’ global operations. In many nations, these powerhouses and four
or fewer other firms dominate the media systems.

Profit over public service

Although the global media system produces much of value, it is deeply flawed
when measured by a democratic yardstick. Journalism tends to assume and
support the patterns described above for the United States, undermining
civic participation and encouraging business domination of social life.
Notions of public service invariably fall before the altar of profit, as
Andrew Graham argued in the first issue of openDemocracy. The collapsing of
professional standards in journalism, as Jean Seaton suggested in her
contribution, is one of the inevitable outcomes.

Public service broadcasting finds itself the square peg in a neoliberal
hole, and survives as an increasingly commercialised affair only because it
is popular, not because it can be justified in market ideology. The great
strength of the commercial system is its ability to generate commercially
marinated light entertainment, which suits perfectly the sort of
depoliticised and inegalitarian society as exists in neoliberalism’s
spawning ground, the United States.

The media giants themselves assert that their power permits them to stand up
to huge governments with large armies and report the tough stories that
would otherwise be neglected. The record, however, points to the contrary.
The annual lists of reporters who have been arrested, beaten, harassed, and
murdered worldwide include precious few employees of the media giants. They
are mostly freelance reporters or journalists working with small-scale
media. The media giants might claim that this is because tyrannical thugs
fear them, but then one would expect to see the media giants aggressively
pursuing the stories that put those valiant journalists in hot water. They
aren’t.

Consider the case of China, where the corporate media lust for a massive
market locked in by a police state has seen News Corporation, Disney, Viacom
and all the rest trade in their scruples for a crack at the jackpot. A
jackpot that Murdoch seems to have won. The moral of the story is clear: the
global media giants use their market power to advance their interests and
the wealth of their shareholders, and to preclude any public involvement in
democratic media policy making. It is a poison pill for democracy.

The solution follows from the critique. We need to democratise media
policy-making, and take it from the hands of the self-interested media
corporations. We need to determine how to establish a well-funded viable and
healthy non-profit and non-commercial media sector, independent of big
business and government. We need to maintain a strong and vibrant
non-commercial public broadcasting service that provides a full range of
programming to the entire population. We need strict ownership and public
interest regulations for media firms that are granted broadcast or cable
licences. And we need policies that promote the creation of small commercial
media as well as media workers’ trade unions. In combination, these reforms
would go a long way toward democratising our media systems and blasting open
the corporate grip over our political cultures. It is not necessarily the
most important task for those who favour a more egalitarian, democratic and
humane world, but it is nonetheless indispensable. It will not be an easy
task, but that makes it no less important.


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