Med_a (i/e)

"After all, what are the media? Who are they? Are they "us"? Take C.B.S., or the New York Times - who are they? They're among the major corporations in the country; they are not "us". They are no more "us" than General Motors is "us."" [1]


The "Operational Plan 34A", a CIA's top secret program against North Vietnam, started in 1961 under President Kennedy's administration and consisted of agent team insertions, aerial reconnaissance missions and naval sabotage operations all leading to the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, a partially fabricated incident, which was the starting point of the official involvement of the US of America in the Vietnam War. In 1966, CBS launched the "Project Nassau", providing financial and military help to Haitians, Cubans and Americans Soldiers of Fortune, in order to invade the Haiti for a coup d'Ètat, installing itself as the sole documentary producer filming the events. The invasion had stopped by 1967 with the arrest of 75 would-be invaders, due to the fact that most of the CBS group were informants of different kinds of governmental agencies. In both cases the mass media, failed to find the truth, or even worse participated in the fabrication of the events. [2]

We have to trace the origins of the modern media back into the early 70's, if not late 60's. Media as a social propagandist and agitator mechanism was always founded on an explicit or implicit representation of the social coherence based on the ground of the existent status quo. Yet in the late 60's it was this very ground that it was questioned and rejected, "...not in the name of some other pattern of ordering society.....but in the name of the unlimited autonomy of individual desire. It assumed a world of self-regarding individualism pushed to its limits. Paradoxically the rebels against convections and restrictions shared the assumptions on which mass consumer society was built, or at least the psychological motivations which those who sold consumers goods and services found most effective to sell". [3]

In the transformation of the individuals to nameless plebs of consumers the media played a major role, since the political and economical model, well hidden beneath the curtain of welfare, was the liberation of all markets from all governmental restraints. It was this ideological nostalgia for an imagined 1850's laissez- faire guided by the Chicago School of Economics, something that has proven to be extremely profitable for the media owners as well.

During 1984/85 the strike of mine workers unsettled the UK. Rupert Murdoch through his press supported Margaret Thatcher in order to crash the strike and diminish the leading individuals of the union in the eyes of the readers. In 1986 Murdoch was largely beneficiated by Thatcher's new anti-union law and almost in one night he fired 6000 of the press workers.

Media barons rise as the new elite, having enormous power in their hands. They support politicians and governments according to their own interests, following in that point all the industrialists and multinational corporations.

Individuals like Reinchard Mohn, former owner of Bertelsmann SG and Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corporation, The Times, Dow Jones and Wall Street journal among others, led the cataclysmic changes in the presentation of the events. From its very beginning, press was suspected of delivering the elite's aspect of the events, and it was in the early 19th century that it developed a Jeffersonian aspect to control and to examine the governments by exposing the truth to the readers. Though this principle was not carried always with success, it remained in the public sub-consciousness; news became reality since they're referred to by the press -- this was a major difference from the ages before the Industrial Revolution.

To say that the contemporary journalists are free to write about anything they like and they have facts to present it to the readers except negative news concerning the media owners and their interests brings only a small scale difference from the times they did so for "their country", " their King" and "their religion". What became even more important is that in the post WWII era, the mass media do not sell information and entertainment to the readers/viewers; they rather sell the latter to the advertisers, their readability became synonymous to creditability, since the mass profits derive from advertisements.

The tabloid effect (among other novelties), insignificant on its own, was not set on a complete tabula rasa. It simply was one of the latest psychological discoveries of the time. We can say that its very core of existence was a potentially dynamic group consistent of about 1 billion of individuals, mainly but not solely in the West, whose economic power became more evident and who had no connection whatsoever with the past. It is also the point which marks the perceived alienation of the human culture. With the words of T.Adorno "What is human in culture -- what is nearest of all, which represents their own affair against the world -- has become alien to human beings. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and what is most alienated of all -- the ubiquity of goods, their own reconfiguration into appendages of machinery -- turns into the deceptive image of nearness. The great works of art and philosophical constructions have remained uncomprehended not because of their all too great distance from the core of human experience, but for the opposite, and it is easy enough to trace the incomprehension back to an all too great understanding: the shame of participation in universal injustice, which would become overpowering, as soon as one permitted oneself to understand it. Thus they cling to what mocks them, by confirming the mutilated form of their essence through the smoothness of its own appearance". [4]

Right after the end of the Vietnam War and the anti-war protests it provoked, the new scenery was ready. Directly, with methods of grey propaganda (where the source may or may not identified and the accuracy of the information is uncertain), using simpler sentences, slogans, large size photographs, and above all a contradictory tactic the first tabloid newspapers gained a large number of readers. The culture industry once contained in the old Hollywood movies and radio programmes, now was able to spread its wings through the advance of television practically in every household in the Western world. This exact march signified the transformation of the press into recognisable labels around the world. Though the press never had a homogeneous stance for any government, just because control over the government shifts back and forth between various elite groupings, it became evident that under certain circumstances they can effortlessly become the cornerstone of a specific policy.

For example in the war of Falkland/Malvinas (1982), the key organs of British propaganda on the home front were all the tabloid newspapers (with the exception of the Daily Mirror). The newspapers supported the war for their own political, economical and editorial purposes. Twenty-nine journalists-all British-and seven official "minders" sailed with the troops. The old-time censorship and war propaganda was established once more. Even the television pictures were flown back by air and screened between nine and twenty-one days after the actual events had happened and of course by the approval of the Ministry of Defence.

This war was the first one where government adopted the lessons learned during the "mistakes" of the press and the official policy for the public opinion makers of Vietnam War. Those lessons were so valuable that they were adopted in every major military crises or wars in the following years, starting from the invasion in Grenada (1983), till the Gulf War (1991) and the invasion in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). The enrolled journalists became the part of the official machinery to control not only the images available for the public eyes but also to fortify government's practices as well as the role of their media in a very highly competitive market. It is crucial to be remembered that this market was alive by the ads in the public and private media. From about $8 billion total overall ad expenditures in the US alone in 1963, the amount was about $31 billion in 1979 and about $196.5 billion in 1998, while global ad spending was about at $435 billion [5]. In order to give more recent results (2007), in US alone, the analyses of the ad expenditure per media is about $40 billion for the newspapers, $20 billion for the periodicals, $17 billion for the radio, $40 billion for the television, $25 billion for the cable and about $10 billion for the internet. [6]

From that point of view it certainly has a meaning to refer to the media as corporate media in a business-dominated society. Under that prism the facts must be examined, for the media and the society, from the microcosmos of everyday life to the vast implications of the foreign affairs. And as Howard Zinn writes (echoing Dennis Ray in that point), the most widely used textbooks [about foreign policy processes] ignored the fact that "foreign policy decision-makers are heavily recruited from large corporations, investment houses and law firms" [7].

In a less radical approach, we can apply a series of micro-analyses to focus on specific media and their "climate" to understand the decisions they make and the agendas they try to impose. Or, we can soften the results by saying that there is no linear relevance between the media and the readers/viewers that the former cannot "guide" the latter in their decisions in their democratic rights since some kind of evaluation and active interpretation of the provided information exists. Even, that we take for granted the results that we have to prove by more thorough study, and our examples were at best misleading or circumstantial. However there are many scholars and essays pointing out the obvious; not only that media are both politically and culturally influential but they have been vital components in state policy formation processes. And even more as Cohen put it "media may not be successful in telling people what to think" [8] but there is much evidence in telling people what to think about.

In 1948 the Operation Mockingbird was launched by the CIA (and officially terminated in 1976), and it is usually referred to as "Mighty Wurlitzer", and in which during the 50's and 60's more than 400 American journalists and academics secretly carried out assignments for the CIA, tacitly or explicitly, from exporting propaganda till supporting and sponsoring various forms of Art in the West world. The operation reached its peak during the 60's when the CIA's propaganda network included more than 800 news and public information organisations and individuals. Among the chief executives who helped the CIA were journalists of CBS, ABC, NBC, the New York Times and Time Inc. [9]

On active audience studies proper, Herman writes "the postmodern celebration of the power of the individual and rejection of global models (and inferentially, global solutions to problems) has an inner deeper perversity, in that it reinforces individualism at a time when collective resistance to corporate domination is the central imperative. The market consists of numerous corporations that organise and plan to achieve their narrow goals, and which have been steadily growing in size, global reach and power. At home, they and their political allies are well funded and active; externally, institutions like the IMF, World Bank, the Gatt-based World trade Organization and the world's governments, work on their behalf. Individual powerlessness grows in the face of the globalizing market; meanwhile, labour unions and other support organisations of ordinary citizens have been under siege and have weakened... In this context, could anything be more perverse politically and intellectually than a retreat to micro-analysis, the celebration of minor individual triumphs, and a reliance on solutions based on individual actions alone?" [10]

In 1971, almost a year before the much celebrated and overestimated Watergate scandal was brought to light, the COINTELPRO (for Counter Intelligence Program) was revealed when a group of radical activists burglarised the FBI's office. The program began in 1956 and was about a series of criminal activities held by the FBI, including homicides, discredit and disrupt activists and political parties such as the Communist Party of the US and the Socialist Workers Party, psychological warfare by spreading false rumours to the media and extralegal force and violence (co-operating with the police). In the beginning many media refused to publish the files and many of the details of the specific program were known only after the publication of the Church Committee investigation (United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities). [11]

As an another one example of the situation which has occurred we can refer that in 2004 General Electric, owner of the NBC, purchased InVision, the major producer of bomb-detection devices used in airports and other public and private spaces. The latter received a staggering $15 billion in Homeland Security contracts between 2001 and 2006. [12]

Of course there can't be any case of uniformity in the media and the elite classes on which they are embedded. Those who are intrigued by the conspirational theories will be majorly disappointed. For three reasons; first of all, not all the journalists are ready to cooperate with the "official" economical, political and military line. Secondly, the marked differentiations of the media as a product in the market are necessary - in order not only to survive but to maximise their profits they ought to be distinctive. Yet they, as well as the culture industry that they support "[they] depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organising and labelling consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may escape; the distinctions are emphasized and extended" [13]. And thirdly, the elite classes never had cohesion or a complete unanimity in pursuing their scopes.

The model of approach we used has a deterministic orientation though the symbioses of the media and the elite groups were never unproblematic; their nexus was never that dense. Yet in periods of crises or what it was perceived as such there was a direct management. As Herman and Chomsky point out "The mass media are not a solid monolith on all issues. Where the powerful are in disagreement, there will be a certain diversity of tactical judgements on how to attain shared aims, reflected in media debate. But views that challenge fundamental premises or suggest that the observed modes of exercise of state power are based on systematic factors will be excluded from the mass media even when elite controversy over tactics rages freely" [14].

George Orwell, who during the World War II worked for the BBC Eastern Service, writing and producing propaganda broadcasts to Asia and who by firsthand experience of censorship and intimate knowledge of such things as the 850 word language called Basic English-which was occasionally used in BBC broadcasts- in his dystopic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four said it best; "Ignorance is Power". The manufacture of political consensus in the Western democracies was always based in an "Orwellian" abuse of the language, namely the "newspeak". "Brainwashed under freedom" is the motto that Chomsky uses to describe the hypocrisy of liberal opinion and its relationship to power. And as R. Murdoch said, describing the internet era, "Power is moving away from the old elite in our industry- the editors, the chief executives and, let's face it, the proprietors". But they can be insured; in the future control will require larger amounts of money but after all we have the media that we deserve.

Polymeris A. Voglis


[1] Noam Chomsky "Understanding Power", Vintage, p.19
[2] http://tech.mit.edu/archives/VOL_091/TECH_V091_S0103_P006.pdf
[3] Eric Hobsbawm "The age of extremes 1914-1991", Abacus, p. 334.
[4] Theodor Adorno "Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life", Verso Books, ch.96.
[5] Naomi Klein "No Logo", Flamingo, p.8 and p.11.
[6] http://purplemotes.net/2009/02/16/us-advertising-expenditure-1998-2007/
[7] Howard Zinn "A People's History of the United States", Longman, p.559 / Dennis Ray "Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science", 1972
[8] Bertrand C. Cohen "The Press and Foreign Policy", Princeton University Press, 1963
[9] Barstow and Stein, March 13, 2005, The Times/ Hugh Wilford "The Mighty Wurlitzer; How the CIA Played America" Harvard University Press
[10] Edward S. Herman "Postmodernism Triumphs", Z Magazine, January 1996
[11] Naomi Klein "The Shock Doctrine" Penguin Books, p.427
[12] http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/churchfinalreportIIIg.htm
[13] Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno "Dialectic of Enlightenment", Verso Classics, p.123
[14] Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky "Manufacturing Consent: The political Economy of the Mass Media", Pantheon, New York

Copyright Notice
The content on glasgowreview.co.uk is © 2008-2009 The Glasgow Review and
individual contributors, and may not be reprinted, reproduced or retransmitted
in whole or in part without the Editor's prior express written consent.