About 50 people showed up on Sept. 27 to hear media critic Jeff Cohen, founder of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, stick it to the corporate media giants. And stick it he did.
With colorful stories culled from his "misadventures" working for big TV news organizations, Cohen painted a gloomy picture of the industry. TV news, he said, is not only rife with profit-over-substance, dumbed-down sensationalism, but it is dominated by conservative opinion for one simple reason: large corporations own the stations, and conservatives are their allies.
I have read up on the issue of media ownership enough to feel confident in my general agreement with Cohen. It dismays me that so few citizens are outraged enough to add their voices to the movement against media conglomeration. While many simply disagree with Cohen's hypothesis, most need more proof of media malfeasance before they act.
The latter group, while conceding that today's profit-driven infotainment foregoes nuanced discussion of issues facing the country, is reluctant to oppose a problem they believe is probably caused more by economic forces than conservative conspiracies. They believe there isn't much that can be done.
According to media critic Robert McChesney, certain basic myths about the media are responsible for this "that's just the way it is" attitude.
One myth is that the First Amendment has always prevented government interference with media in a free market. Unregulated media is the American way, right? Actually, in the early generations of America, freedom of the press was seen as a social right of "the people" and not as a commercial right belonging to wealthy investors. No one talked about free markets in media. For example, the government debated how to best subsidize distribution of newspapers. The idea of leaving them on their own would have seemed ridiculous.
Today's media markets have high barriers to entry caused by a system of exclusive broadcasting rights. Monopolies and oligopolies dominate. Such a market has no right to treatment as a "free" market, especially when it holds such sway over public opinion.
Another myth, also appealing to economics majors, is that a free market media just gives the people what they want. This one is partly true; TV networks wouldn't run a story on me making pancakes because no one would watch it (a shame - I make beautiful pancakes). However, oligopolistic media markets give producers sovereignty. They give us what we want, but only with a certain degree of quality and a political bent that maximizes profits - celebrity scandals, speculative stories instead of investigative ones and "issue debates" between centrists, moderate conservatives and hardline conservatives.
This myth also ignores the "negative externalities" of our media, the worst of which is hypercommercialization. The Federal Communications Commission is currently studying how media advertising might increase obesity in children. I guess TiVo is a social stratifier: the well-off can fast-forward through commercials, while those who can't afford it buy more junk food and get fat.
Finally, there is the myth that the Internet "will set us free." Online, all voices will finally be heard. Sadly, it turns out that there's a greater degree of media concentration online than offline. According to an article titled, "More News, Less Diversity," by scholars from the National Center for Digital Government at Harvard University, most people surf the Web using links and search engines and are therefore "directed to a few very successful sites; the rest remain invisible to the majority of users ... Almost all this diversity is ignored."
Cohen's claim that the Internet is "tailor-made for real debate" is only somewhat true. While blogs and forums allow everyone to voice their opinions, they also tribalize Internet users along social and political lines - for example, socialist bloggers tend to blog with other socialists.
Furthermore, Americans are not turning away from TV for news, and they certainly aren't turning to the Internet. A 2003 Consumers Union survey found that 56 percent of respondents used TV as their primary source of national news. Only 6 percent primarily used the Internet, and they usually used the Web sites of major TV or newspaper outlets. Granted, things may have changed since 2003, but these percentages have been stable since 1996, when the Internet first took off.
We see these myths everywhere, but most notably in the rhetoric of the FCC, which does its darndest to protect industry trends. The commission blocked two major 2003 reports on the social costs of media consolidation until last week, when Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., made them public and ignited a scandal that - what do you know? - has received little media coverage. The FCC ordered one report destroyed, but a lawyer saved a copy. It showed, not surprisingly, that stations with local owners cover more local news.
The answers to the problem of corporate media consolidation are not complicated. First, toughen up media ownership laws. Then bring back the Fairness Doctrine, which was gutted 20 years ago under the Reagan administration. The Fairness Doctrine mandated more local news, diversity of sources and greater limits on advertising than the "free market" gives us.
With the current FCC and federal administration, I don't expect to see these changes soon. But if we shed these myths, we could learn a lot more from reformers like Cohen and be prepared to act when the time is right.
Kailin Clarke '07 makes a mean pancake.
