As
if one “Powell Doctrine” weren’t enough: On June 2, the prevaricating Secretary
of State’s son Michael, joined by two other Republicans on the five-member
board of the Federal Communications Commission, dropped the Big One on media
diversity.
Michael Powell, the FCC chair, never
left any doubt of his intentions. In interviews and speeches before D-Day, he
promised to relax limits on media concentration and “cross-ownership” of print,
TV, and radio outlets. Powell’s position was largely ideological — as a
neoliberal, he’s prone to dismantle public services and bow to “market forces.”
But let’s not forget he was named to the FCC by Bill Clinton, not some Bush or
other. (And don’t forget that Clinton stood behind the 1996 Telecommunications
Act, another milepost in this downhill slide.)
The “market” in this case is almost
exclusively one of sellers, not buyers. Before the June 2 decision, the agency
received around 750,000 public comments. One of the dissenting commissioners
was quoted as saying the comments were “99.9 percent opposed” to relaxing the
ownership rules.
Don’t worry, says Powell.
Bigger is better.
You don’t think he’d state it so
crudely? Here’s what he told the Media Institute in Washington, DC, this past
March: “While many view big as always antithetical to the public interest,
scale and efficiency are becoming more vital to delivering quality news and
public affairs. The world is getting smaller… It is increasingly imperative to
have a larger perspective on matters of public interest… This complex world
requires ever more sophisticated news gathering and delivery capability. The
scale and resources necessary to do it are increasing.”
Like his father, Michael Powell
holds a powerful microphone. (His official bio proudly notes he was once chief
of staff of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division!) But people across
the political spectrum are finding their voices. In the US Senate, for example,
North Carolina’s Fritz Hollings, Alaska’s Ted Stevens, and North Dakota’s Byron
Dorgan are part of a bipartisan fightback.
We might not see any Congressional
action for a while. But with such forces arrayed against the FCC majority’s
faith in laissez-faire, I’m betting there will be at least a partial
restoration of the old rules.
Yes, I hate media concentration as
much as the next guy.
But what really gets me is a related
phenomenon: media dilution, the
tendency to speak to the least common denominator and to accept the easy lie
over the difficult truth. I hardly need tell you this is a persistent feature
of mass media in the US. But its roots go deeper than we usually think.
The roots are sunk in basic
psychology. Take the tendency toward repetition, most noticeable in the
commercials but also present in the news. You find the same story across the
channels at 6 and 11, and you hear the same “analysis” on PBS in the evenings
and in the public-affairs ghetto on Sunday morning. Expect more of the “more is
less” approach when Murdoch rules the world.
Columnist Arianna Huffington
recently explored the problem. She drew on social scientist Gustav le Bon, who
she said “has stressed the importance of repetition as a weapon in the
fanatic’s arsenal. Repetition breeds blind acceptance and contagion. ‘Ideas,
sentiments, emotions, and beliefs,’ writes le Bon, ‘possess in crowds a
contagious power as intense as that of microbes.'” Huffington noted how
repetition persuaded many Americans of an outright lie: that Saddam Hussein was
responsible for 9/11.
Repetition’s first cousin is
dullness: pure, unadulterated drivel. There’s plenty of this already, and not
just on the “reality” shows, which in some ways are superior to straight news.
(Joe Millionaire, after all, told the
audience up-front that its premise was a scam.) The fact is, the US media are
so shallow and boring that serious readers and viewers are deserting in droves,
often via the Internet.
After 9/11, for example, Americans
thronged to BBC broadcasts and webcasts and to UK papers like the Independent. Speaking of the latter:
Many people, myself emphatically included, have become big fans of Robert Fisk,
the Independent‘s Middle East
specialist whose no-holds-barred reports from Iraq under US attack did not
neglect the things Americans needed most to hear: for example, how American
forces slaughtered civilians and destroyed communities and cultural treasures.
Fisk, though he worked for years at the Times of London, has never excited much interest in the American mainstream. So it is
with writers who don’t read from the script.
But the
concentrated-diluted American media have done lots worse than ignore a durable
professional like Fisk. They’ve ignored a true American hero.
First, let’s be clear: That hero was
not Jessica Lynch. But Lynch’s story
is a perfect example of what happens under a growing media oligopoly.
I don’t say this because of the
myths and facts — how Lynch was actually injured in a vehicle accident rather
than wounded by hostile fire, how she was saved by rather than imprisoned by
Iraqi hospital staff, and how US military personnel staged a “rescue” and
manipulated the news.
Nor do I say this because of the
Jayson Blair angle. (The New York Times ex-reporter’s fabrications included some fanciful word-painting about the Lynch
homestead.)
No, I say this because of the deal
that CBS News has offered Lynch and her family. The deal may include the
production of a two-hour documentary and some “entertainment” options with CBS,
Simon & Schuster, and MTV — all of which are Viacom properties. Suffice
it to say, the deal sucks as bad as the media machine that created the “Saving
Private Lynch” mythology.
To appreciate the full foolishness,
compare all this to what befell the true American hero I mentioned.
This hero is Rachel Corrie, a
23-year-old from Washington State who died under the blade of an Israeli
bulldozer in Rafah, Gaza, this past March. Corrie had gone to Gaza with a
solidarity team who put their bodies on the line to prevent home demolitions in
occupied Palestine.
Not that Corrie’s saga is entirely
unknown: Some US papers, and not just out in Washington, gave the outline
shortly after the tragedy. Sympathy was briefly extended. Predictably, some
vitriol against Corrie contaminated the Internet, too.
But the facts have pretty well been
buried with the young woman — facts which, however you shade them, reveal her
active heroism. She stood up to the machine, and she paid for it with her life.
Not even the
alternativepress, which increasingly prefers
hipness to grand causes, has taken much interest in Corrie.
I did a search of the Association of
Alternative Newsweeklies’ online archive of weekly highlights, gleaned from
AAN’s 116 free-circulation papers (including this one). The search turned up
only one piece on Corrie, from The
Stranger, based in Seattle. It’s true the alt weeklies must concentrate on
local news, but the honorific alternative was earned by countering the mainstream on the global front.
Of course, many AAN papers now are
owned by mini-conglomerates like Village Voice Media and NT Media, which throw
their weight around the comparatively small pond. That may have everything,
something, or nothing to do with the silence still hanging over Rachel Corrie.
If you’re interested, Harper’s (June 2003) has a selection of
Corrie’s e-mails from Gaza. The UK Guardian ran some of her e-mails a while ago. Kudos to both.
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2003.
