From: nlns@igc.apc.org (New Liberation News Service)
Newsgroups: rec.mag
Subject: The Media Monopoly (part 11)
Date: 5 Oct 1992 23:48:40 -0500
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

/* Written  6:48 pm  Oct  2, 1992 by bfrg9732@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu in cdp:alt.activism */
/* ---------- "The Media Monopoly (part 11)" ---------- */

The Media Monopoly

by Ben H. Bagdikian

Part 11 -- Mass Media Without Masses



"By 1990, publishers of mass circulation daily newspapers will 
finally stop kidding themselves that they are in the newspaper 
business and admit that they are primarily in the business of 
carrying advertising messages."
    -- A. Roy Megary, publisher, Toronto Globe and Mail     

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"There is a steady decay in public loyalty to the media. There is 
hostility or indifference toward modern newspapers and the same 
fate is hovering over television."

Looking back, it was in the years 1965-1980 that American mass 
media came under maximum control of the corporados. 
"...[Corporate] ownership changed the form and content, the 
strategies of operation, and the economics of newspapers... 
Newspapers and other media bought by large corporations as 
investments [came] under new pressures for maximizing profits."

The group having the most disposable income were those between 
the ages of 18 and 49. Advertisers were eager to reach this 
group. "Broadcasters cannot keep the nonaffluent and elderly from 
watching or listening to their programs, but they design the 
content to attract younger, affluent viewers. Newspapers control 
the readership by not reporting significantly on neighborhoods of 
low-income and elderly populations..."

This "unwanted American population" who are being more or less 
ignored by the media is not small. "In 1984, families with less 
than median combined income... constituted 50 percent of all 
American families... [The] unwanted population of the 'wrong 
ages' -- younger than eighteen and older than forty-nine -- 
constitutes 54 percent of Americans; those older than forty-nine 
make up 26 percent of the population."

But the advertising-driven media is not interested in reaching 
the maximum amount of readers but rather in reaching the maximum 
concentration of dollars. Short-term profits "...are now 
imperative in the major media almost without regard for the 
future of media institutions... Wall Street investors look for 
dividends... and are not moved to behave today by considerations 
of the more remote future. Advertisers demand immediate sales 
based on the appearance of their ads..."

"In the race for short-term profits, the American newspaper is no 
different from other large American corporations in the last half 
of the twentieth century. But the newspapers represent an 
institution which, unlike steel mills and automobile companies, 
affects the roots of the democracy... Magazines similarly have 
adopted a strategy that enhances immediate high profits at the 
expense of long-term stability."

Television also follows this pattern. The result of the frantic 
pursuit of the dollar by t.v. executives "...is to design 
programming that will serve the split second of attention-getting 
rather than humanistic substance that will stay with the viewer; 
the ratings race serves the advertiser's needs, not the 
audience's."

"Besides producing greater emphasis on soft content detached from 
serious news, the concentrated corporate control of [the 
media]... also strained out extreme political writing... 
Newspapers began carrying a variety of political columns, but 
none, right or left, strayed very far from centrist positions and 
none was permitted to stress anticorporate ideas. It was a clear 
demonstration of neutralizing the news to make papers more 
efficient carriers of advertising. But it produced social 
sterility and silence on fundamental forces behind major news 
events."

"The consequences for American politics have been serious. One 
assumption of the 'objectivity' doctrine of reporting is that 
every side of a dispute has an equal and opposite side. No 
'extreme' views are considered legitimate, though the 
characterization 'extreme' is often applied to politics 
considered normal in other democracies. Anything beyond the 
status quo is in danger of being seen as either communist on the 
left or fascist on the right."

Thus, in order to create a facilitating ambience for 
salesmanship, the news is emasculated. The "news" becomes 
trivialized. When this happens, when "...the daily news, in print 
and broadcasting, is perpetually cast in terms of largely 
physical events related to personalities and devoid of political 
and social meaning, [the public has no]... way of identifying, 
analyzing, and assessing the value of alternative social forces. 
The social and political sterility of American reporting leaves 
most citizens without a coherent view of politics. In an 
inevitable circle of indifference, this leaves most citizens 
without a sense of involvement in the news. Political news 
becomes personal melodrama carefully strained of explicit 
political and social significance."

"The news media -- diluted of real meaning by apolitical and 
sterile context, homogenized with the growth of monopoly, 
overwhelmingly more of a service to merchants than to the 
audience, and filled with frivolous material -- are a threat to 
their own future but also to the body politic."

"When sterility of news writing fails to relate political and 
social events to real forces in society, it produces something 
worse than 'nothingness.'... [The news] is left as isolated 
fragments..." We can make nothing of the present moment. "And if 
people can make nothing of the present moment they tend to remain 
static and bewildered, left at the mercy of whoever acts with 
power..."

However, "The product of the news media... has begun to lose its 
vigor as an institution. When the news is designed to exclude a 
third or a half of the population, it has sacrificed much of its 
standing as a democratic mechanism. And if it delivers accounts 
of events without relating them to the real world it has begun to 
fade as an important force in any society."


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Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman
"Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well."
End part 11