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/* Written  4:42 pm  Oct  6, 1992 by bfrg9732@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu in cdp:alt.activism */
/* ---------- "The Media Monopoly (part 14 of 14)" ---------- */

The Media Monopoly

by Ben H. Bagdikian

"The Media Monopoly" is published by Beacon Press in Boston.
Help support the work of Ben H. Bagdikian by purchasing this book.


Part 14 -- Afterword

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"Modern communications have become a technological window through 
which the various tribes of the human race catch glimpses of each 
other... A major force in the penetration of [the former barriers 
between the different 'tribes' of the world] has been 
nongovernmental, free-enterprise mass media, run for profit or 
without direct control of nationalistic or ideological 
authorities... [But unfortunately we are] moving in the direction 
of substituting one set of dangers for another. Instead of 
control by governments, public opinion is increasingly controlled 
by a small number of private corporations."

New worldwide empires "...have already emerged. Their control of 
the global mass media expands almost weekly. Their names are seen 
in headlines as actors in a financial competition that is now 
entered only by mammoth corporate organizations, backed by the 
largest multinational banks and their politically compatible 
national regimes. They already command international audiences 
larger than any political leader in history."

For example, "Time Warner, formed by merger of Time, Inc. and 
Warner Communications, is the largest media corporation in the 
world. It has more technical communication power than most 
governments."

"The new global giants are doing more than expanding their 
control over the technological instruments that issue news, 
information, and entertainment. They and their subsidiaries are 
also gathering up world copyrights of earlier information and 
popular culture... Much of what used to be free in libraries or 
inexpensive for the average consumer is rapidly growing in cost, 
thanks to exclusive corporate ownership."

"The new global media firms did not grow in a vacuum. First, they 
became dominant within their own countries, a process usually 
aided by the mutual accomodation between powerful media 
corporations and powerful politicians. A political regime gives 
the large corporation favorable tax and regulatory favors, and 
experiences official amnesia regarding antitrust laws. In return, 
the politician or political regime is given either favorable 
treatment or is spared what might otherwise be hostile treatment 
or, worse, no treatment at all."

Just as these global media firms did not grow in a vacuum, so too 
they do not *exist* in a vacuum. "Dominant mass media firms have 
become so large that their financing, credit, interlocked 
directors, and sometimes their ownership intertwine them with the 
world's largest banks and investment houses. That troika -- 
global media corporations, the multinational industries that 
advertise, and the worldwide banking establishment -- represents 
a new power in world politics and economics."

		     -- Materialism --

There is "...another American tradition [besides the 'technical 
skill and positive accomplishments of American broadcasting'] 
that the rest of the world is now inheriting and could do 
without. Underlying the growth of commercial television around 
the world has been the promotion of materialism... Television, 
even more than print, is best at selling goods that are marginal 
to basic needs -- cosmetics, for example, rather than education."

"Television is most effective at selling competing goods that are 
only marginally different... That is why commercial television so 
insistently creates fantasy worlds, not just in commercials, but 
in the associated programs that must create what television 
officials call a 'buying mood.' The fantasy is needed to 
associate some desired goal -- heightened sexuality, business 
success, popularity, power -- with possession of a superficial 
physical object, like a particular brand of soft drink, or 
perfume, or cigarette."

Because greater and greater sales must be achieved, the 
"...regular repurchase [of the same or similar products] has to 
be stimulated by creating ever-changing fashions, so that goods 
still physically useful will be discarded as socially 
unacceptable. The pervasiveness of television commercials thus 
spreads the ideology of materialism and fashionable consuming..."

	      -- Noncommercial Television --

"An enemy of commercial television is noncommercial television, 
since those audiences reduce the audience for commercial 
television. Noncommercial broadcasting also reminds the public 
that there is an alternative to the heavy doses of sex-and- 
violence, fantasy advertising, and programs designed primarily to 
create a 'buying mood.' Noncommercial broadcasting can deal with 
public issues and controversies in ways avoided by commercial 
broadcasters whose advertisers, understandably, do not wish their 
products associated with public controversy."

It is sad to note that in some countries "Conservative 
governments, responding to banking and private media pressures, 
and in pursuit of their free market and privatization policies, 
have instituted plans to increase commercial channels and 
simultaneously reduce the funding and independence of the 
existing, better, noncommercial systems, such as the BBC in 
England, the provincial public systems in West Germany, the 
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the Corporation for Public 
Broadcasting in the United States."

		    -- Conclusion --

"The alternative to preventing giantism in the media is to depend 
on the social responsibility of the corporations... [Social 
responsibility on the part of the corporations] would prevent the 
spread of cancer and heart disease to the youth of the world by 
transnational television commercials for cigarettes. Social 
responsibility by the media giants and their clients would not 
continue the degradation of children's programs or promote sex 
and violence... [Corporate social responsibility] would restrain 
rampant materialism."

However, it is clearly useless to ask competing corporations to 
show social responsibility. Milton Friedman has written: "Few 
trends so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free 
society as the acceptance by our corporate officials of a social 
responsibility other than to make as much money for their 
shareholders as possible." So for Friedman and his followers, 
social responsibility does not extend beyond the pursuit of 
greater and greater profits. "Friedman's view of social 
responsibility is dear to the heart of most major businesspeople. 
The mammoth corporations that now dominate the mass media in the 
United States and, increasingly, throughout the world, seldom say 
it as incautiously as their favorite economist, but they are 
pursuing it with growing ferocity."

"We know enough to fear governments that possess unaccountable 
power. And we know how to prevent creation of private power that 
possesses the same traits, and to do it by business principles 
that leave each corporation free to publish, broadcast, and 
record whatever it wishes, and provide the public with real 
alternatives. But if that freedom exists without true competition 
in the marketplace of ideas, and if each media corporation is 
permitted to wipe out all effective rivals and dominate its 
field, these corporations become as unaccountable as a 
dictatorial censorship."


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Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman
"Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well."
End part 14 of 14
End of series.