Dark Trends in World Media

Media critic Robert McChesney is the author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times, and most recently, It's the Media, Stupid!. He is a research professor in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois. The following is an extract from a talk he gave at WACC’s office in London on June 13th 2002.

I think that no-one here needs to be convinced that media and communication issues are central to social justice issues, to issues of fairness and equity, to self-governance, those points are probably self-evident. And I suspect that I don’t need to give a long critique of the neo-liberal approach to media and other matters, although it is still the dominant ideological rhetorical position of the world, though the rhetorical position may have nothing to do with the reality, the rhetorical position of course is that a corporate-dominated, commercially driven media system is the natural order of things, and that this automatically proves to be the best possible outcome for the human race.

Now, those are both lies, they’re both extraordinary lies. We used to call them Big Lies with capital letters.

There’s nothing natural about a commercial media system, it doesn’t fall from the sky, it doesn’t come flying out of the wealth of nations when you open it to chapter eight. A commercial media system is the explicit result of government policies, aggressive regulation to create the system that wouldn’t exist without extraordinary government intervention.

The US media system, the much-heralded free-market system, is the result of extraordinary government intervention that created it, in the public’s name but without the public’s informed consent. The largest media companies, without exception, are built on the back of government-sanctioned monopolies for broadcast frequency or cable systems, and they then use the super-profits from those monopolies to acquire film studios and all the accoutrements of being a super-power. But those are government created and enforced monopolies. Even those industries that are considered to be less regulated, the internet now, film, music, publishing…all depend upon copyright for the basis of their commercial success.

Copyright is a government enforced monopoly. That’s not deregulated, but very heavily regulated We have a heavily regulated media system. The neo-liberal system is heavily regulated but it’s heavily regulated in favour of those who sit atop the system, so they call it deregulation, because they win. But it’s not deregulation, it’s regulation for them, not us. And it does not produce the best possible outcome. In just the basic liberal democratic theory, it doesn’t require an immersion in the Frankfurt school of social theory, in basic elementary democratic theory if you have a communication system that is the providence of a very small number of self-interested individuals, commercial and un-commercial, that’s not a good thing.
The core precept position of democratic theory, of liberal theory is:

the more voices the better, the more diffuse the control over communication, the better – that’s healthy. And so there’s a strong suspicion built within liberal theory that the concentration of control, especially unaccountable control is something bad, it has to be justified, it can never be taken as a given, as natural.

We live in a situation today in the world in which, regrettably, increasingly communication is the providence of a few of the powerful commercial interests. It is the result of a system which is extraordinarily corrupt. The policy making process: in the United States the crucial decisions for every media are almost all made behind closed doors with no public input whatsoever. The lobbyists that represent the largest commercial sectors are extraordinarily powerful, I’ve written about it and others have as well, it’s difficult to exaggerate just how sleazy it is and in fact no-one does question this, even conservatives that like the system acknowledge “yeah it’s sleazy, but we win, tough luck”. No-one claims it’s a fair system, it’s pure corporate warfare.

Links

Robert McChesney’s own site contains many articles, interviews, lectures reports and information on his books:
www.robertmcchesney.com/

The political economy of global media, article in Media Development
www.wacc.org.uk/publications/md/md1998-4/mcchesney.html

Rocket Science: Robert McChesney on private power, public broadcasting and how corporate media subvert democracy.
www.mediachannel.org/views/interviews/mcchesney.shtml