DR. S. AUSAF SAIED VASFI presents an in-depth study of corporate media, its objectives, its masters and its impact on society, particularly in India, and its solution.
Before attempting to analyse the subject briefly, let us, for the sake of up-to-date-ness and clarity, refurbish our memory as to what exactly today’s corporate media is; what its background, its propaganda model, its impact upon society, especially the techniques to achieve its ends are. And what is the solution, if any, of the problem?
Let me first quote what the practitioners of the dubious art have, sometimes ago, confessed publicly in this regard:
“There is no such thing in America as an independent press, unless it is in the country towns…You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write (sic) his honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print… I am paid one hundred and fifty dollars a week for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with – others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things – and any of you who would be so foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job…The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread…You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be toasting an ‘Independent Press.’…We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”
– John Swinton, editor of the New York Tribune, in the 1980s, at a banquet of his fellow editors.
“To keep information from the public is the function of the corporate media.… In the United States, both the Republican and Democratic Parties, with only a few prominent exceptions, have been and are in the pay of the corporate media and communication giants.” These are the words of John Nichols and Robert McChesney.
Returning to the subject, corporate media is a term that promotes Pax-Americana. It refers to a system of media production, distribution, ownership, and funding, which is dominated by large corporations, and is governed by the capitalist imperatives of maximising profits for their investors, stockholders and advertisers.
The Western media critics such as Robert McChesney Ben Bagdikian Ralph Nader, Jim Hightower, Jeff Chester, Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman suggest that such a media system, especially when allowed to dominate the mainstream media, will be inevitably manipulated by these very corporations to suit their interests. These critics point out that the main national networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC, as well as most, if not all, of the smaller cable channels, are owned, funded, and controlled by an interconnected network of large corporate conglomerates and international banking interests, which, they say, manipulate and filter out news that does not fit their corporate agenda.
They also argue that the programming on these outlets clearly reflects the views of its owners, most notably Fox News Channel, headed by Rupert Murdoch through his parent company News Corp., as well as Roger Ailes, the CEO of FOX News itself.
Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman have established a propaganda model which purports to philosophise this bias. The common misinterpretation of this model is that all bias is conscious and centralised. The process however is hypothesised to be decentralised and operates as a confluence of factors that include the overt pressure from owners and advertisers, but also by the gradual internalisation of the biases and values of the corporate owners, leading to self-censorship.
Other factors include the tendency of journalists to avoid doing original research, instead of obtaining news from the same few wire services, such as Reuters and Associated Press, which themselves tend to cover the same news under the same perspective. Due to the desire to reduce operation costs, the mainstream media favour news pieces that are pre-made by these news agencies instead of conducting their own reporting.
These corporations use mass communication, as well as an understanding of the human subconscious, to turn consumption into an inner compulsion. New desires and habits are implanted by corporate advertisers to replace the old.
The views and statements made by governments, officials, military, police, national security organisations (such as the FBI and CIA), as well as various other political offices are regularly reported as facts and are published without any (or very little) fact-checking by the corporate media.
Perhaps the most infamous example of the impact of the propaganda model on world events and societies was during the two-year period following September 11, 2001. During this time, according to an in-depth research project, conducted by The Centre for Public Integrity, then President of the United States George W. Bush and seven high ranking officials in his administration made at least 935 or more false statements about the threat posed to the world and to American national security by Saddam Hussein. These false statements were virtually uncontested by the corporate media and presented as a sound rationale for both the invasion of (and war against) Iraq and “The War on Terrorism”.
The result was the “manufacturing of consent” for the invasion of Iraq and “The Global War on Terror/ism” in which hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives. As an example, Jessica Yellin on “Anderson Cooper 360” admitted being pressured by corporate executives to present positive stories during the run-up to the Iraq war.
Large corporate and business houses (Exxon Mobil, Citibank) and US Government agencies like FBI, CIA, UK- MI5 are mainly interest-driven economies, And the countries, which are behind the corporate media, their aims, ambitions and agenda are imperialistic and capitalistic. Therefore, whatever comes in their path is a roadblock. They malign it, demonise it and denounce it. Islam, in their jaundiced view, is the main roadblock in the advancement of their peculiar lifestyle and US expansionism and imperialism. In the beginning they used the Orientalists. They simply failed. Now they have additionally employed rather meaner means like cartooning the Last Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be with him), followed by justification of their action.
The institutions the imperialists used include local media outlets and the local intellectuals, the ruling party and the opposition party leaders, who advocate their agenda and promote their policies.
The NGOs, in the garb of humanitarian help, promote the hegemonistic agenda. The missionaries, in the garb of alleviating poverty and spreading education, spread their faith throughout the world. The United Nations itself is one of the offshoots of imperialism. The IMF and the World Bank etc. are an effective tool in the advancement of American suzerainty in attractive garbs.
The most disturbing dimension of the corporate media intervention is that the truth, the bedrock and the sheet-anchor of any civilized society, becomes the first casualty in reporting and editorialising done by the paid journalists. This is evident in the light of the public admission from the proverbial horse’s mouth, as reported above.
Spin doctors work over time to give facts a “spin” so that the story suits the taste of their target audience. The viewers of media giants like CNN, Fox, BBC World, CNBC, Sky, they say, were highly disappointed to see bodybags of Western soldiers coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq. Hence stories are given a twist and a different angle. In such situations, the focus of Western reporters, based in war zones, is on “the material support” the insurgents are getting from Iran and Syria (in case of Iraq) and from elements in Pakistan (in case of Afghanistan.) The real magnitude of Western losses is preferably hidden.
Remember George W. Bush, as a policy matter, used not to attend the funerals of fallen US soldiers.
Iraq, which occupied a huge proportion of headline news for years, provides many good examples of twisted, biased and lackadaisical reporting.
In February 2008, only a few minutes apart, two Iraqi women detonated themselves in two crowded markets in the Iraqi capital. Authorities said that 98 people were killed and 200 wounded. Eyewitnesses reported a grizzly scene where human and animal body parts littered the streets. Instead of admitting failure in halting the violence, which plagued Iraq since the US occupation of 2003, US and Iraqi authorities resorted to a language that continually distracted from the truth and the real issues.
This is how Alissa J. Rubin began her article for the New York Times (January 31, 2008): “The unsettled situation in northern Iraq continued Wednesday as Iraqi troops massed in Mosul to fight Sunni Arab extremists.” Rubin further quotes an Iraqi Defence Ministry spokesman as claiming that the goal of the military operation is to “oust Al-Qaeda in Iraq from the city and prevent its fighters from returning.”
CNN online opened one of its articles with: “Two mentally disabled women were strapped with explosives Friday and sent into busy Baghdad markets, where they were blown up by remote control.”
The allegation was attributed to an Iraqi government official who said that “people referred to the bomber at central Baghdad’s Al-Ghazl market as the “crazy woman” and that the bomber at a second market had an unspecified birth disability.” Who are these “people”? Did the CNN reporter examine the legitimacy of that claim by interviewing any of them’?
But Lt. Col. Steve Stover, spokesman for the Multi-National Division, Baghdad, had an explanation that seems, at least from the viewpoint of CNN, much more relevant than the seemingly unimportant questions above.
“By targeting innocent Iraqis, they (those who dispatched the “mentally disabled” women suicide bombers) show their true demonic character.” Thus, CNN’s headline: “Demonic militants sent women to bomb markets in Iraq.”
In recent days, a serious crisis has engulfed the Indian press. It is suffering from multiple diseases, heavy blindness, creeping paralysis, imbecile apathy and obsessive neurosis. In such a situation what can one do?
What is needed is a series of transplants, starting with the heart.
The media in “free India” is showing palpable bias. Personality bias, bias against foreign events and editorial bias, are a few to name. But bias of the media in projection of personalities, has crossed all limits in recent days.
A case worth mentioning here is the Babri Masjid story. None of the media ever talks, and talked, about its historical aspects, the origin of the conflict, Muslim standpoint and their case, the motive behind the opponent groups raking it up, etc. Simultaneously, the media never fails and failed to add a punch line that this is an emotive issue related to the belief of millions of our Hindu brethren.
Just another hurting example of the painful bias in media was the case of a Muslim woman in Uttar Pradesh, some years ago. Imrana Bibi, a woman from Muzaffarnagar, was allegedly raped by her father-in-law. The alleged rape of Imrana by her father-in-law in an obscure village shook India, Muslims particularly, besides pitting secularists, feminists and other rights activists against each other. And the media lost all ethics while reporting the incident and went on for weeks to show the entire Muslim community in poor light as if this was the accepted norm in Muslim society, and in their hot pursuit for sound bites, they provided enough ammunition to the hardline, prejudiced groups. The media did not bother to find out the truth behind the story, which came out later.
Not only that, interestingly, at the same time a similar incident took place barely 50 km from Imrana’s village. In that case a Hindu man was accused of similar charges by his daughter-in-law. The story merely got space in the inside pages of some of the vernacular dailies and was totally ignored by the national mainstream media.
Another cause of concern for all of us today is media’s excessive commercialisation, which is further affecting its credibility. The latest is poll-time “paid news” and “coverage packages” for aspirants. This is perhaps the lowest low touched by the so-called sentinel and watchdog of society. Add to it the game shows recently launched by TV channels which are offering huge sums as prize money. The allurement for easy money is there, and given the high stakes, it is nothing but a gamble in a different garb. And gamble always has some inherent vices, which are being overlooked deliberately in the rat race.
With the advent of KBC, everything has changed, most importantly the relations between TV channels and their viewers. Earlier, the aim of the channels was to keep hold of its viewer on the basis of sensitivity and human interest in their programmes. Now TV channels do not try to attract viewers but buy them. The Press Council, having no authority to enforce its injunctions, is just helpless.
Add to it the promotion of nudity and shamelessness and indirect propaganda of a particular religion and its norms. It is a post-Mahabharata and post-Ramayana serials phenomenon.
As far as the suggestions to ameliorate the situation are concerned, one can cite the case of Al-Jazeera, the Arabic satellite news channel, headquartered at Qatar. It is popular throughout the Middle East. Al-Jazeera saw two Iraq wars through Arab eyes, and the Pentagon and other U.S. leaders didn’t like what Arabs saw.
Telesur satellite television network, headquartered at Caracas, Venzuela, is covering Latin America. It was launched to counterweight to large international media such as CNN, Univision, BBC and Deutsche Welle and has been successful. It is another thorn in the eye of US.
The sad reality is that media, both print and electronic, have failed in their expected roles. It looks as if the corrective role as a career of democratic, plural and moral values and as a guardian of civil rights has vanished from their sight. Now cheap entertainment and licentious sex rule the roost.
Peace TV is a commendable effort but some cable operators, out of prejudice, do not provide it.
Let us, therefore develop our own independent media.
Let us train journalists and push them into media mainstream.
Let us develop our news agencies, etc. for our objectives.
Having said all that, it needs to be kept in view that media to us is just a means, not an end in itself. For that we need committed professionals. Mere professionalism is not enough for us. We need media persons who have character, initiative, thinking-capacity, imagination, vision, determination, steadfastness and perseverance.
If you go deeper, you would find that it is not just corporate media that is gnawing at the nerve-centre of the nation. It is the system, punctuated with flaws and failures. Let us not concentrate on pruning the branches. Our focused attention should be on the fountainhead of the evil.