Hidden Truth/Hidden Truth.iso/data/newspostings/1801-1900/1874

Internet Message Format | 1996-06-22 | 8.5 KB

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Newsgroups: alt.paranet.ufo
Subject: Mind Control and the Growing Media Monopolies
Date: 22 Jun 1996 21:45:44 GMT
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Found at: http://boulder.earthnet.net:80/~bweditor/060696/coverst.html

                                MIND CONTROL,
                           THE OCTOPUS' TENTACLES.

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by JOEL DYER

It's estimated that by the time a child in the U.S. has reached the age of
six, he will have spent more time watching TV, movies and video games than
he'll spend interacting with his father during a lifetime. In other words,
the way we think is shaped more by the creators and dispensers of such
information than by our system of education or even by our families.

We now know that a wide range of behaviors - from how we vote to how we
treat each other (i.e., violence, racism, discrimination) - are greatly
influenced, and thereby at least partially determined, by these streams of
information.

It was with this in mind that I and 700-plus members of the alternative
media gathered at the first Media & Democracy Congress last March in San
Francisco. It was the consensus of those in attendance that the ongoing
consolidation of media ownership is the greatest current threat to democracy
and culture.

Media have always had a substantial influence on our society. But in the
past we were exposed to an unlimited variety of views. For every big-money
corporate influence that entered our lives there was a blue-collar version
to provide at least some balance. This is no longer the case. Take for
instance the nightly news.

Reporters, including TV newscasters, were once our first line of defense
against those who sought to limit, control or manipulate our freedoms. When
the Standard Oils of the world monopolized an area of commerce, journalists
were there to expose them - consequently bringing about antitrust actions
that benefited all of us. When corporate giants bought too much power over
our elected officials, we read and heard about it in the news. When we went
to war the news media questioned why and aided society in counting the
costs. Not so today.

These days the news media are just another tool used by powerful
corporations to circumvent the laws designed to protect the citizenry from
the hardships we experience when monopolies go unchecked.

Even now our food supply is virtually controlled by only eight companies and
that number grows smaller every year. But don't expect to hear about it in
the mainstream press. How could NBC, a mere cog in the General Electric
machine, or CBS, the house organ for parent company Westinghouse, point a
finger at other monopolies without drawing attention to themselves? Now that
Disney has bought ABC we've seen a drop in stories that could cause negative
publicity for the entertainment giant. However, the positive news coverage
of Disney ventures, such as its theme parks, has skyrocketed. Even CNN, the
most powerful news network in the world, became nothing more than a monopoly
patsy after Turner Broadcasting was purchased by Time Warner.

How can journalists at these major news networks be watchdogs over the
defense industry that now signs their million dollar paychecks? How can they
report effectively on influence peddling and politics when they are
subsidiaries of the largest participants in the ongoing fire sale of
American government?

There are countless examples of our decaying media infrastructure. For
instance, where has our national skepticism and fear of the nuclear industry
gone? It's just another casualty of the sin of omission. We don't hear about
the nuclear industry because it's controlled by the owners of the network
news - primarily General Electric and Westinghouse.

So why aren't today's "watchdogs for the people" up in arms - those supposed
caretakers of the common man like Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson? Simple.
Limbaugh's TV show belongs to Gannet/Multimedia, and Robertson's Family
Channel is partly owned by TCI.

This is nothing new. Our current antitrust laws only came into being because
they were championed by reformist monthlies such as McClure's at the turn of
the century. The industrialists of that day handled those pesky muckraking
magazines the same way today's corporate giants handle media; they bought
them and forced them to stop reporting on monopolies.

In 1994, Advertising Age reported that corporations spent a staggering $150
billion on national advertising. So how much influence does that buy?
Hopefully, for corporations, enough to destroy the validity of mainstream
journalism. What the corporate monopolies have forgotten is that we, the
public, aren't stupid.

When Disney forced the journalists of ABC's Day One to apologize to major
advertiser Phillip Morris - which buys its TV influence through its
subsidiary, Kraft Foods - Americans knew that the show's report about the
tobacco giant's manipulation of nicotine in cigarettes was accurate and were
outraged by Disney's kowtowing.

Again, when Westinghouse forced the CBS journalists at 60 Minutes to kill an
interview with Jeffrey Wigand - the former employee of tobacco manipulators
Brown & Williamson - we were further angered.

Unfortunately, this buying and destroying of the press isn't limited to the
news networks. Daily newspapers have fallen prey to the trusts of Gannett,
E.W. Scripps, Times Mirror and Knight-Ridder. Just ask the striking (not to
be confused with scab) reporters at the once highly regarded Detroit Free
Press what they think of being owned by Knight-Ridder. They'll tell you
tales of a paper concerned only with profit and appeasing advertisers. And
why not? Knight-Ridder isn't a part of any community. They have no
obligation to anything except the bottom line. They, like the other chains,
are a profit-driven venture whose only loyalty is to the stockholder.
Newsroom cutbacks remain a top priority for Knight-Ridder Chairman & CEO P.
Anthony Ridder. As a reward for turning good papers into highly profitable,
low budget, wire service dailies, CEO Ridder made $1.1 million in total
compensation last year according to American Journalism Review's June issue.
So how does this affect communities with chained-owned papers, communities
like Boulder? It's not so much what you read, but rather what you never see.
Hard to do, and therefore expensive, investigative stories simply don't get
done. And negative coverage of large advertisers is rare if at all. The
profits go up as the news goes down. First rate reporters are relegated to
the role of glorified typist. Communities with chain-owned papers have lost
their best defense against government bureaucracies, corporate polluters and
the like.

But perhaps there's a silver lining to all this tainted monopoly news. In
this month's The Nation, Johns Hopkins University's Mark Crispin Miller
speculates that "some good seems also to have come out of this annus
horribilis of big waivers, big mergers, big layoffs and big lies. Suddenly
the risks of media monopoly are now apparent not just to the usual uptight
minority of activists and scholars but, more and more, to everyone. People
want to know what's going on, and what to do about it. The time has
therefore come to free the media by creating a new, broad-based movement
dedicated to this all important mission: antitrust."

It was with the hope of helping to strengthen this "all important mission"
that I and other editors at the Media & Democracy Congress decided to share
our research in order to provide as much information on this subject as
possible to our readers.

I still remember the disbelief I felt in March when Miller handed me a copy
of his media consolidation maps for the first time. They were roughly drawn
on copy paper and they were, without a doubt, one of the most terrifying
things I had ever seen. There were no words of explanation on the paper,
they weren't needed. It was clear from the diagrams what was at stake -
everything.

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