IT'S THE MEDIA, STUPID!

(From Just Peace, Winter, 1998-99)

It is not an exageration to say that the mass media lie at the very heart of the major social problems of our time: the TV, radio, newspaper and magazine industries, and to a somewhat lesser extent the film industry, are, taken altogether, the most critical of obstacles to progress in solving the potentially calamitous ills unfolding in the U.S. today. Ecological degradation advances on what is now obviously a global scale, fueled by an energy-intensive consumerism and a gluttonous addiction to the automobile and petroleum -- and the mainstream mass media is still debating whether global warming is actually occuring, and has contributed virtually nothing toward a recognition of alternatives to a social life dedicated to the pursuit of an ever increasing affluence, nor to a public commitment to resolve the staggering problem of the automobile. Cities balloon over the landscape in an uncontrolled sprawl where increasing pollution, urban and suburban blight and compulsive haste and distraction progressively devour social and private life -- and the news media can do no better than bemoan inner city crime, flight to suburbs and traffic congestion, all symptoms not the problem. Increasing economic inequality has furthered the stratification of society over the past two decades, posing a dire threat to democracy -- and the mass media have mostly given the matter merely token recognition, and have gone out of their way to avoid inflaming public discussion of such obvious solutions as beefing up progressive taxation and public education and jobs. What our mass media seem best at is distracting us: with the urgent need for wars over "American interests" in the mideast, with sordid stories about the rich, famous and powerful, with an increasingly tabloid-like sensationalism.

There is some truth to the notion in defense of the mainstream media that after all they merely purvey "what the people want" to see and hear. In order to sell newspapers and magazines, publishers clearly must make sure their wares appeal to consumers' wants. If people don't want to read at any length about constructive approaches to serious social problems, then so be it: the media can do nothing about that.

The trouble with that defense is, first, that the media do not in fact sell their wares to the actual consumers of their products. The revenues from readers' purchases constitute only a tiny portion of newspapers' and magazines' earnings, and viewers' and listeners' purchases of programming play virtually no role whatsoever in the earnings of TV and radio programming producers (pay-per-view TV, the only exception, is not exactly sold to the vast majority of the viewing audience). Instead, what these media are in the business of selling is advertising space for firms to peddle their products -- essentially, the media sell firms access to the eyes and ears of an audience of potential buyers of their goods. The media are not responsive then to their actual consumers' wants as reflected in purchases of their product, they are responsive to the wants of advertisers.

Of course, advertisers do want access to as wide an audience of potentially interested buyers of their goods as possible. Hence TV programming producers do attend closely to program ratings, a measure of audience attendence and thereby of advertisers' potential interest in purchasing advertising space. But advertisers don't want merely numbers alone: they also want audiences that are as open and accepting to their advertising messages as possible. Thus they prefer that audiences not be in a particularly critical mood about things, not be too distracted by public issues when it is private consumption that should matter, not be too thoughtful about the real worth of things in the larger context of their lives on earth when obviously only purchaseable commodities can fulfill the soul.

Thus when advertisers buy space from the media, their purchases will be directed accordingly. From their perspective, broadcast entertainment and news programming, as well as the content of mass audience newspapers and magazines, serve as "packaging" for advertisements, and if the packaging is not right then people won't properly attend to the ad's. Media firms that do not provide content or programming appropriately conducive to the right kind of audiences will accordingly be less successful making sales to the real buyers that count.

The effect on media content is demonstrable: the media do not respond well at all to "what the people want". There are plenty of cases of TV programming producers cutting programs with acceptable or even high ratings. Vast public outcries have occurred over local TV news producers' obsession with crime, the national networks' blatant exploitation of children's advertising, and the reduction, throughout the mass media, of thoughtful discussion of social change and "politics" to the base level of personalities and "moral" characters -- and have gone largely ignored. Scientific polls showing vast majorities who would rather not have heard another word about OJ Simpson or the Bill & Monica Show were dutifully reported in the media but not in the least acted upon.

More importantly, however, the argument that the media are merely giving people what they want ignores the fact that the media actually play a role in shaping people's wants in the first place. This is not to say that people are all programmed by a mass media system that can turn them around in any way it wishes, like zombies. But the mass media provide the vast bulk of what constitutes many people's intellectual and cultural life, and is for most people a primary source of information about other people's values: for the majority of us it is perhaps the single most significant stimulus toward reflection upon others and ourselves.

It's true that "hard" evidence of the media's influence on people's values and behaviors is mostly available only in studies of TV violence. But hard evidence of the effectiveness of advertising is not lacking at all: firms would not be spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually on advertising were it known to have no appreciable effect on those at whom it is aimed. And it would be absurd to insist that of all the mesages conveyed through the media, only those that advertise products may have such effect on people's values and behaviors. (The argument that instead of actually influencing people, advertising merely "notifies" them of available products is also absurd, in light of the lengths to which advertisers seem willing to go in order to appeal to and encourage certain attitudes in their audiences.)

All of this is what ought to be expected of mass media that are fully incorporated as ours are in a system of unmitigated laissez-faire capitalism. Like other firms, media corporations too are dedicated first and foremost to the business of maximizing profit in the interest of those who own and control them. And they are peopled by employees who, like most of the rest of us, are obliged by circumstances to follow the dictates of their bosses (journalists and commentators too work without the kind of protections afforded by the institution of tenure for college professors), making of the mainstream media a parody of the tenets of free thought and speech.

It is economics then that is the the primary guiding concern of media corporations as social institutions, not the promulgation of people's culture. If the pursuit of advertising sales is therefore the foremost preoccupation in the media, aggressive growth is their main dynamic principle. Like other capitalist firms, media corporations too are compelled by markets either to expand at an appropriately ambitious rate or else to be gobbled up or put out of business by other more expansive competitors. Unbelieveable corporate mergers and increasing concentration in the media industry are the unavoidable consequence. Thus, by now not one large American city is served by more than a single outside conglomerate-owned daily newspaper. And virtually all of the great "variety" of TV networks and cable channels are owned by a half-dozen media conglomerates. You cannot find "diversity of perspective" in the mainstream mass media.

No wonder too that certain kinds of themes, subjects and issues are generally anathema in the mainstream media. For example, while it's true that labor unions engage only about 12% of the workforce today, you'd think their membership was far less than that, to judge by the coverage given them in the media (and of course, when they do get coverage the emphasis is most often negative). Similarly, a full decade since the supposed "end of the Cold War" even the least sympathetic coverage of socialism and communism is still treated almost universally in the mass media as a major taboo. And of course, alternative approaches to structuring the media themselves, i.e., along lines other than the advertising-financed, outside-conglomerate-owned, top-down-hierarchical media structures of American capitalism today, are simply unheard of.

What can be done? First, each of us individually must seek out and encourage in every way those alternative sources of news & entertainment that are now available. There are, in fact, many such sources, difficult though they often are to find, being small and interspersed in the niches of today's culture -- they constitute a world of which the dominant mass media are almost completely oblivious. There are independent radio stations, 'zines, films & theaters, and internet sites, not to mention grassroots/local-community/neighborhood activities, the essence of (true) popular culture (a major unfortunate effect of the hegemony of the mass media is its nearly total encroachment into what was formerly "local community cultural space"). Second, we need not only to encourage and "consume" alternative media now available, but also to actively participate in these ourselves where possible: produce 'zines, broadcast shows, make films, write articles and construct internet sites of our own.

But this is a public issue, and while those things are critical, even more so is the need for committed political action to alter existing mainstream mass media structures. We need public regulations to assure democratic access to the media for a real diversity of political views and cultural perspectives. And we need a major commitment to public sponsorship, financing and even ownership in all the mass media -- not just a "public broadcasting system" that gets progressively more privatized every year, but a real alternative to the status quo, some real competition to the private mass media funded by private advertising.

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