MEDIA CONTROL AND THE MASS MIND

WHO GETS ELECTED to political office is obviously affected by the information available to voters, not only about specific candidates but about issues. Here we face another threat to democracy and our day-to-day quality of life: the increasing concentration of media ownership in fewer and fewer hands.

In many nations, for example fundamentalist Iran, newspapers that don't conform to official dictates are shut down. Any deviation from officially approved policies, beliefs, or religious dogmas is censored and severely punished. Thankfully, we don't have this kind of media control in the United States. But here too we're seeing a radical narrowing of sources of news and opinions.

More and more independent newspapers are shut down or swallowed by huge media companies that control many publications. Even the Internet is becoming more centrally controlled, as both access and content are recentralized in the hands of ever fewer commercial entities like AOL/Time-Warner and the Microsoft Network.

In the first edition of his renowned book The Media Monopoly, published in 1983, Ben Bagdikian shocked the nation by reporting that fifty companies controlled most of America's mass media-- newspapers, magazines, books, films, radio, television, cable, and music. In the I997 edition of the book, the number had shrunk to ten.

By the 2000 edition of the book, it was down to only six: AOL/TimeWarner (which also owns substantial print media, including 24 magazines, among them, Time, Fortune, and People); Disney (which owns 22 major subsidiaries, including its enormous theme parks, the Disney Channel, and ABC); Viacom-CBS-Paramount; Bertelsmann (which owns an international media empire that includes the giant U.S. publisher Random House and its many subsidiaries, as well as Bantam Books, Doubleday, and Dell); Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (which controls another international media empire, including HarperCollins, Twentieth Century Fox, the Fox Channel, 132 newspapers, and 25 magazines, including a percentage of TV Guide); and General Electric (which counts RCA and its subsidiary NBC among its holdings).

As you can see by just turning on the TV, these and other corporate giants are spreading destructive messages about what is normal and desirable in human relations. This doesn't mean that there are bad people in these organizations. Most are simply repeating, and all too often amplifying, the kinds of messages they have learned to accept. They are people who were raised and are now living by deeply ingrained dominator rules. Hence, they also often tend to filter, shut out, or deny information that contradicts their worldview.

Denial is characteristic of dominator personalities who learn this fear-driven pattern of shutting down and filtering their perceptions early on. But denial is also characteristic of people who seek to justify their beliefs, actions, and lifestyles. So what we're dealing with is not an evil conspiracy or a matter of evil people. It is a problem built into dominator systems, which, to maintain themselves, block out anything that threatens them.

I emphasize this because the information I'm outlining is not intended to blame media people, the wealthy, or even the corporations that control the media. It is to alert you to a dangerous situation that will only change if enough of us, including people in the mega-corporations that today wield so much power, become aware of what is happening to the media--and to us.

TODAY CHILDREN GROW UP in homes where televisions are turned on for an average of seven hours per day--more time than most children spend in school or with their parents. The average child is likely to have watched 8,000 screen murders and more than 100,000 acts of violence by the end of elementary school. So by the time they are adults, violence seems natural, and uncaring and abusive relations seem acceptable, even entertaining.

As the former Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School of Communication, George Gerbner writes, all this "cultivates an exaggerated sense of insecurity, mistrust, and anxiety about the mean world seen on television.... Media violence demonstrates power and paves the way for repression.''

Simply put, media violence and the normalization of insensitivity support dominator politics. When we condone, support, and export violent media, we are helping to create mindsets receptive to "strongman" leaders who can get things "back under control" with punitive rather than caring policies.

The ratio of men to women on U.S. television further supports dominator beliefs, habits, and policies. It is a shocking two to one. What does this massive imbalance subliminally communicate to children and adults? Isn't it that men are more important than women? Not only that, what is communicated by the fact that women are disproportionately cast as the victims of crimes and violence? Doesn't this too reinforce the message that men are active, women are passive, and that violence against women is natural?

And doesn't the low ratio of poor people on television and the casting of people of color disproportionately as criminals or victims of crimes also invalidate the actual experiences, dreams, and needs of people of color? The huge toll of energy and the heroic fortitude it takes to live day in and day out with the grinding stress of racism, and the poverty that often goes with it, is virtually invisible on TV.

In contrast, white males are frequently cast in heroic roles, including roles where they have a great deal of power. Also, these male characters often acquire and use power through violence, further reinforcing dominator stereotypes of masculinity and once again communicating that violence is normal, even desirable, in human relations.

This problem is particularly serious in children's television programs and movies, where violence is regularly presented as manly and fun. In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and its sequel The Secret of Ooze, for example, there are an average of 133 acts of mayhem per hour. As Gerbner writes, in this kind of film, "males fight, torture, gorge themselves on pizza (brand names prominently displayed), burn, crush, mutilate, and kill." As for women, in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, "one lone mini-mini-skirted sex object (intrepid reporter bossed by boorish editors) is assaulted, scared, victimized, and rescued at least three times" until finally "she, too, kills and earns an appreciative 'You're a natural, Sis.'"

Consider how these vivid images of violence as normal, heroic, and fun influence the developing brains of children. As discussed in earlier chapters, the brain's neural and biochemical networks--and with this, habits of thinking and behaving--are largely shaped in childhood by what we experience, including what we see modeled for us. These vividly brutal TV programs and films have an impact on the developing brain of a child. Video games are even more brutal, and rap songs often aim much of their cruelty and violence at girls and women--for example, albums of Two Live Crew, Ice Cube, NWA, Cannibal Corpse, and Eminem feature songs with titles such as "Get Off My Dick" and "Tell Yo Bitch to Come Here." Even in the news, the most prominent headlines are reserved for acts of violence.

All this violent "entertainment"--which is exported worldwide --poisons the minds of not only children but adults. It gives the false impression that pain and violence are the most interesting and newsworthy events and human behaviors. It constantly communicates, on both the conscious and unconscious level, that what counts in life is who inflicts pain and on whom pain is inflicted--the staples of dominator politics.

THE MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY

I DIDN'T ALWAYS THINK OF THE MEDIA as political. I certainly didn't think the media spread a regressive political agenda, having often heard corporate and political figures complain that the media are "too liberal.'' It wasn't until I began to analyze the content of mass media systematically that it became evident--despite all the talk about democracy, freedom, and equality--that the media often support the opposite.

Not only do the media tend to make relations based on domination, and even violence, seem the inevitable order of things. The mass media, with only a few exceptions, have also steadily "dumbed down" their content. This is true not only of television, but even of the print media, where there also has been a massive consolidation of ownership in book, newspaper, and magazine publishing.

While this dumbing down is sometimes justified on commercial grounds (the idea being that this is what a mass audience wants), it is actually a way to dumb down the mass audience, making us more easily manipulated both commercially and politically. As was often evident in the debates between Bush and Gore during the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign, the media force political candidates to dumb down their speeches and other messages, and instead fool around like comedians on late-night shows. This effectively substitutes superficial sound bites for serious coverage of important ideas and issues.

Consider that during the same period that Aid to Families with Dependent Children was massively cut, the U.S. government gave away millions of dollars to huge corporations to help them advertise their products overseas: for example, $16 million to Gallo, $9 million to Pillsbury, $4 million to M&M candies, $1 million to McDonald's, $1.5 million to Campbell's Soup, and $2 million to Fruit of the Loom.  But the mainstream press did not point out that this corporate welfare was the direct outcome of political contributions made by corporate interests, who quite literally are writing their own laws.

It is scandalous that when tobacco giants gave millions to politicians to do their bidding, this only got a little story in the back pages of most newspapers. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the Republican defeat in I998 of anti-smoking legislation, which would have raised $516 billion over twenty-five years to improve the quality of education and other social services, was directly related to donations to Republicans by the tobacco companies. During 1997-1998, Philip Morris gave $2 million to Republicans (versus only $490,000 to Democrats) and R.J. Reynolds gave the GOP $1 million (versus only $100,000 to Democrats).

Similarly, political contributions from communications and electronic industry sources to federal candidates in the 1995-1996 election cycle totaled over $53 million. However, barely mentioned in the news was the obvious fact that these contributions had something to do with the passage of the I996 Telecommunications Act, which legalized the largest concentration of media control in U.S. history.

Another thing you won't find making front-page news is the despotic nature of some of the regimes and would-be regimes our government has been arming and training. Even after the September 2001 terrorist attack on the United States that killed over five thousand people, only the alternative media pointed out that during the I980s the Reagan administration supported--indeed, helped create --the Taliban to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan. And only alternative news outlets noted the fact that many of Osama bin Laden's cohorts, and possibly bin Laden himself--the people the U.S. government now holds responsible for this massacre--received military and financial support from the C.I.A. and U.S.-supported fundamentalist Pakistanis.

THE NARROWING OF THE INFORMATION available to us goes beyond the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, internal censorship of the media that has been thoroughly documented by Ben Bagdikian, Robert McChesney, Dean Alger, and others. As Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber document in Trust Us, We're Experts, almost half of our news is now generated by public relations firms in the service of major corporate interests.

A study by the Columbia Journalism Review found that in a typical issue of the Wall Street Journal more than half the news stories were based solely on press releases from public relations firms. Not only that, video news releases--entire news stories written, filmed, and produced by public relations firms--are transmitted by satellite feed or the Internet to thousands of TV stations around the world. These public relations firms are hired specifically to put a positive "spin" on corporate activities and images. So it shouldn't surprise us that our news is heavily filtered even before it gets into the hands of the people who decide what's fit to broadcast or print.

The seriousness of our environmental problems is another topic that is treated gingerly by the mass media. Scientists keep warning us about global warming, holes in the ozone layer, the loss of biodiversity, and other threats to ecological balance--and hence to the health of every one of us and even to our survival as a species. But these warnings are rarely on our front pages. For example, in 1992, 1,700 scientists, induding the majority of Nobel laureates from the sciences, issued "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity," which spelled out why "if not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future. . . and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life."But this dire warning wasn't even reported by most newspapers and TV newscasts. And when it was, it was tucked away as a short item with no details or editorial comment. On the day of its release, the New York Times instead found front-page space for a story about the origins of rock and roll, and the Globe and Mail's front page made room for a large photo of cars arranged in the shape of Mickey Mouse.

The mainstream media are owned by giant corporations, and their advertising customers are giant corporations. So the media constantly push consumption of ever more goods--and rarely mention the environmental depletion and pollution caused by overconsumption. They also rarely mention that many of the products they advertise damage our health. For example, as long as cigarette ads were a major source of revenue, the media rarely reported on the link between cigarettes and cancer. In the same way, we rarely see reports that dairy products are actually harmful to many people because of allergies, or that there are data linking prostate cancer to high consumption of dairy products.

When I first became aware of these trends, I became angry and alarmed. Angry, because we depend on the media for reliable information. And alarmed because filtered and dumbed down information makes it difficult for any of us--including government and business policymakers--to make adaptive choices, much less to effectively participate in elections and other democratic processes.