Category Archives: Corporate Media

Who owns the media?

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Media-Control

Big Media is a term commonly used to describe the landscape of consolidated media companies. I object to the term because it is a case of framing gone amuck. The phrase is supposed to immediately generate an image of something big and bad– like the wolf who torments Little Red Riding Hood– but it creates a distorted and slanted concept of media. I don’t deny the facts. There are five major multinational corporations responsible for much of the media viewed, but not the majority of media produced. The difference is subtle, but important. We need to start recognizing that we as a distributed, emergent network of consciously evolving contributors to society. “Big Media” harkens to the old concept of media as a one-to-many broadcast tower that sends information down a one-way channel. This image does not take into account the many small ways that we as fully formed individuals actually respond and form our own opinions about what we consume. I don’t deny the highly distorted and manipulative concepts of the world that are delivered through corporate media, but I also find it necessary to rethink our activist strategy, which in the end can have a subtle message of disempowerment. We have to think like a swarm and not like individual victims.

With that said, however, there was a development yesterday that does not bode well for local and minority owned media. The FCC made it easier for large companies to consolidate even more. At this point it will take Congress to enact a law to regulate increased media ownership. You should most definitely take action by going here. They want 100,000 signatures and or only at 27,000 right now. Please spread the word!

Colonization of cyberspace

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Let’s call it what it is. The geography of the planet has been fully mapped, demarcated and corralled by the system of private property (otherwise known as “enclosure“) with the rare exception of dwindling public spaces, reserves and parks (and our various temporary autonomous zones). The next frontiers are interior territories: the mind, DNA and cyberspace.

Will this be the future of the Internet, in which the only commons will be virtual bioparks? If you don’t like this scenario, take control and be active. We need to be vigilant protectors of the commons which was built with public money.

Click here to take action.

Two cents on the writer’s strike

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I haven’t followed the WGA strike as closely as I like, but this video, which is causing a small stir, says it all. The media companies want to squeeze every penny from as many eyeballs as possible, yet little, if any, will be returned to the brains behind the content. It’s an old story and one of the reasons I quit the journalism biz. The contracts were becoming far too one-sided and nefarious. The truth is, media companies in general view the writers as contract workers who have no ownership or right to the product that is the source for the company’s profit. The industry is basically a glorified factory business that manufactures fantassy. For this I am so happy the writers have some spine.

For snarky (and entertaining) updates on the strike situation, go here.

CNN’s lost generation

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Sometimes I wish CNN would just roll over and die. An announcement they are creating a news bureau in Second Life confirms that they are trend followers, and are no longer innovators. Yeah, so maybe a 24/7 news network was once a brilliant idea, but with the Web, who cares? Having failed at emulating the Fox News effect (by proliferating right wing news commentators through out their broadcasts) and comedy (by trying to inject Daily News antics here and there), they are now looking for salvation in user generated media, but the thing that they forget is that they are a huge multinational corporation. How does their business model jive with the new media revolution? Hence the humor of the following anecdote from youth media advocate Anastasia Goodstein:

Ypulse: Media for the Next Generation:

… when I was visiting CNN, they were talking about how to get young people to upload their own news video — one person remarked that they have been getting one kind of interesting video from teenagers: video imitating CNN anchors. Teens would create their own satirical skits making fun of the news and upload it to CNN (“The Daily Show” effect?).

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Thoughts on media mind control

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Periodically I get requests to review material to see if it’s relevant for media literacy. I was asked to view the above clip, which I found instructive in terms of how not to think about media. What follows is my reading:

Upon reviewing the video I would not recommend it for media literacy. While it is true that the many people in corporate media are on the CFR, I don’t believe they take directives from a secret group. It’s an issue of them all sharing the same values and worldview in the same way the same people mentioned probably all went to Ivy League schools and were in the same fraternities. Also, in terms of its educational applicability, it’s my opinion that it’s better to demonstrate how coverage of certain issues benefit specific sectors of society. A good example of this would be from the Noam Chomsky documentary, Manufacturing Consent, because it has good case studies.

Furthermore, I really don’t like the idea of conspiracies and secret cabals. Life is chaotic and messy. It’s easier to create chaos than order, although there is a point that generating a perpetual state of disorder is one kind of control, and that certainly has been true through out history. But that tiger is not an easy ride. If mind control truly were possible, we’d all be pretty mind-frakked right now. The system is in place to do it. Why hasn’t it happened?

Also, all the media discussed in the clip are increasingly irrelevant because the entire mediascape is evolving into a new paradigm. The assumptions of the narrator is that we inhabit a one-to-many, vertical model of information distribution, when in fact we are now in a more horizontal, many-to-many distribution flow. I’m not saying that corporate media are not dangerous to the planet, but we need newer ways of understanding, and unfortunately this particular clip features some outdated views of how media currently operate.

Finally, I don’t believe in the “conduit” form of media: that is, the idea that information exists as objects that are delivered from one person to the next without being altered. Communication is messy, so ideas don’t transfer that well. For example, how many of you can repeat all Ten Commandments and agree on what they mean? What is dangerous about media is how they produce “subjectivities”: ways of thinking. In a sense, the above clip just repeats the same “subjectivity” of the people it purports to critique, yet another example of the snake eating its tail. Time to change our diet.

A great example of corporate responsibility

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You may have noticed the Rosetta Stone ad on the right column. Rosetta Stone is a great language learning software package that I have been using to learn Italian. Not only is it a great system, they are one of the more responsible corporations out there providing a tremendous planetary service. Their Endangered Language Program is designed to help indigenous communities develop their own Rosetta Stone software to preserve their local language. The most amazing thing is that the community gets to retain rights to the program. I big high five to one corporation making a difference.

Rosetta Stone: Endangered Language Program.:

We Preserve More Than Words
Pass on a Living Language to Future Generations

Across North America and around the world, indigenous communities are working to preserve and revitalize their languages. Rosetta Stone can be a valuable resource for these efforts. Indigenous communities contract Rosetta Stone to develop editions in their language for their exclusive use. Around North America—from the Mohawk community of Kahnawake in the northeast, to the Seminole Tribe in the deep south, to NANA Corporation’s Inupiat shareholders in the Arctic—Rosetta Stone has been selected as the technology of choice for language revitalization.

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Jim Cramer’s meltdown

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Jim Cramer CNBC Meltdown – Watch more free videos

I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop on the mortgage scam and real estate bubble so I think Jim Cramer is hitting the right pitch here. The European press is going nuts about the US economy at the moment; I’m a little shocked by how the collapse of the subprime mortgage market is downplayed in the US media. Face it, corporate media are invested in the hype and it serves them to not panic.

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iPhone provider censors Pearl Jam

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The offending video

ATT, the exclusive provider for the iPhone, allegedly censored Pearl Jam‘s anti-Bush remarks during a Webcast. See below for details.

Pearl Jam Ten Club News: pearljam.com tenclub.net:

After concluding our Sunday night show at Lollapalooza, fans informed us that portions of that performance were missing and may have been censored by AT&T during the “Blue Room” Live Lollapalooza Webcast.

When asked about the missing performance, AT&T informed Lollapalooza that portions of the show were in fact missing from the webcast, and that their content monitor had made a mistake in cutting them.

During the performance of “Daughter” the following lyrics were sung to the tune of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” but were cut from the webcast:

- “George Bush, leave this world alone.” (the second time it was sung); and

- “George Bush find yourself another home.”

This, of course, troubles us as artists but also as citizens concerned with the issue of censorship and the increasingly consolidated control of the media.

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Mapping corporate media

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Foxad

“We report. You Decide.”

Wondering where your news comes from? One of the underlying principles of a “propaganda environment” is an information complex in which the values of the system are internalized. Remember that traditional media are corporations in the business of selling programming, including news. One of the criticisms of traditional media (as opposed to networked media or citizen journalism) is that they generate their own reality: they define what is “information,” not the reverse (i.e. the Fox News slogan, “We report. You Decide.”). Only rarely do the carefully orchestrated presentations of news get unhinged: natural disasters and major events like 9/11. I found it curious, though, that within 12 hours of the airplanes hitting the WTC, news companies had already edited amateur video into a narrative that looked like a film trailer. This is an example of how events are made into packages.

Anyhow, below is an interesting map of the interlocking interests between news companies and other major multinational corporations. For a detailed map of corporate board rooms, go here. The following is a snapshot that is a couple years old, and some of the members will have changed by now, but you will get the picture.

Project Censored Media Democracy in Action:

A research team at Sonoma State University has recently finished conducting a network analysis of the boards of directors of the ten big media organizations in the US. The team determined that only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. This is a small enough group to fit in a moderate size university classroom. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. In fact, eight out of ten big media giants share common memberships on boards of directors with each other. NBC and the Washington Post both have board members who sit on Coca Cola and J. P. Morgan, while the Tribune Company, The New York Times and Gannett all have members who share a seat on Pepsi. It is kind of like one big happy family of interlocks and shared interests. The following are but a few of the corporate board interlocks for the big ten media giants in the US:

New York Times: Caryle Group, Eli Lilly, Ford, Johnson and Johnson, Hallmark,
Lehman Brothers, Staples, Pepsi
Washington Post: Lockheed Martin, Coca-Cola, Dun & Bradstreet, Gillette,
G.E. Investments, J.P. Morgan, Moody’s
Knight-Ridder: Adobe Systems, Echelon, H&R Block, Kimberly-Clark, Starwood Hotels
The Tribune (Chicago & LA Times): 3M, Allstate, Caterpillar, Conoco Phillips, Kraft,
McDonalds, Pepsi, Quaker Oats, Shering Plough, Wells Fargo
News Corp (Fox): British Airways, Rothschild Investments
GE (NBC): Anheuser-Busch, Avon, Bechtel, Chevron/Texaco, Coca-Cola, Dell, GM,
Home Depot, Kellogg, J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, Motorola, Procter & Gamble,
Disney (ABC): Boeing, Northwest Airlines, Clorox, Estee Lauder, FedEx, Gillette,
Halliburton, Kmart, McKesson, Staples, Yahoo,
Viacom (CBS): American Express, Consolidated Edison, Oracle, Lafarge North America
Gannett: AP, Lockheed-Martin, Continental Airlines, Goldman Sachs, Prudential, Target,
Pepsi,
AOL-Time Warner (CNN): Citigroup, Estee Lauder, Colgate-Palmolive, Hilton

Stopping ‘fascist’ takeover of US media

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The Raw Story | Rep. believes Democratic media reform bill may prevent possible ‘fascist’ takeover of US media:

Concerns about monopolies and fears of a possible “fascist” takeover of the US media have prompted a Democratic congressman to push to restore the Fairness Doctrine, RAW STORY has learned.

“Media reform is the most important issue confronting our democratic republic and the people of our country,” Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) said at the Free Press National Media Reform Conference held in Memphis, Tennessee last weekend. “This is a critical moment in history that may determine the future of our country…maybe forever.”

GoogleTubing

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Digital-DestinyI had a chance to see Center for Digital Democracy‘s Jeff Chester at the ACME Summit and I think he is way ahead of the curve in understanding what is really happening with the convergence between new digital media technology and mega-media corporations. His talk was chilling and got me to reconsider my participation in MySpace.

So before everyone gets all rah-rah about GoogleTube, read the following article of his in The Nation. It basically summarized his main talking points.

The Google YouTube Tango:

“Under the radar of all but the most savvy Internet users, powerful commercial forces are rapidly creating a digital media system for the United States that threatens to undermine our ability to create a civil and just society. The takeover of YouTube by Google announced October 9 and the 2005 buyout by Rupert Murdoch of MySpace are not just about mega-deals for new media. They are the leading edge of a powerful interactive system that is being designed to serve the interests of some of the wealthiest corporations on the planet.”