Media bull strings. Image by Webdiary artist Martin Davies. www.daviesart.com

G’day. A new Webdiary reader emailed last weekend:

 

I am very grateful to have found this opportunity to say something. I am an ordinary professional person leading a normal life in what I grew up to think was a democracy. Then why am I now taken back constantly to my childhood when the inhumanity of Nazism was a topic of conversation around our dinner table and when democratic values were spoken and lived every day with gratitude that we had won the war, that my father had returned (the only one to do so from his town) and that we could live in peace, confident that goodness prevails in the end?

This government frightens and outrages me. I smell Nazism every day in the news and I want to know where to go to meet like-minded people to talk, to protest, and if necessary in the long run, to revolt. I don’t know where to find people like this. Most of my friends seem passive and only minimally concerned.

Do you know of any action groups or how one can become politically active?

I replied:

Do you believe in liberal values? There’s a new group called the Reid Group in Sydney – former Dems, Labor, Liberal, plus people from the Wilderness Society – all sorts – which you might like to join. I wrote about them in Can Liberalism fight back. Or you could join the Greens! Do you read Webdiary? There’s lot of people who feel as you do. I could publish your email and ask readers for suggestions if you like – would you prefer to remain anonymous?

K.E. (name and address supplied) replied, in part:

Thank you for your reply and information. I have only just discovered Webdiary and am enjoying it immensely. I got onto the political compass and came out as ‘liberal left’. The company is not bad, but I worry we are all a bit too peaceful in that sector of the compass.

Thank you for recommending the Reid Group. I have now subscribed to their newsletter and look forward to participating in future events. I have never been politically active, so there is a lot to learn. However, I do have an interest in corporate cultures and have written on the impact of psychopathy in organisations which led me to an interest in the personalities involved in corporate collapses such as One Tel, HIH, Enron etc. I’m currently reading and researching in this area looking at the effect of power on narcissistic personalities. Our own Mr Ruddock is a prime example.

It would be good to hear readers’ suggestions, as I am also interested in finding discussion groups. So yes, publish the letter and we’ll see if anything comes of it.

Over to you. Can you help?

Here is the editorial in the latest edition of Dissent magazine, lovingly published by journalism stalwart at The Age Kenneth Davidson and his partner Lesley Vick from their home three times a year. It’s essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the motivations of the Murdoch-Howard assault on democracy through cross media changes to go before the Senate again soon. Control the media and who will expose the insider’s spin to the people? Dissent is available in good newsagencies; its email address is dissentmagazine@ozemail.com.au.

How virtual democracies are primed for profit and war

by Kenneth Davidson

Modern democracies have been around for long enough for neoliberal capitalists to learn how to subvert them. They have mastered the technique of infiltrating the instruments of democracy – the ‘independent’, judiciary the ‘free press’, the parliament – and moulding them to their purpose. The project of corporate globalisation has cracked the code. Free elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities on sale to the highest bidder. (Arundhati Roy, 13 May 2003)

The excuse used by Bush, Blair and Howard to invade Iraq was the imminent threat posed by Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. This claim now appears to have been untrue, not an intelligence failure. If the US military had thought there was an outside chance that Iraq had WMD capable of threatening its neighbours, let alone the US, it would not have massed its main invasion force just over the border in Kuwait – well within range of any WMD worthy of the name. The US is looking for a diplomatic solution to its differences with the North Korean regime of Kim Jong Il – rather than a preemptive strike – precisely because it thinks the regime could have one or two nuclear weapons and the means and will to deliver them.

The post-war exposure of the unproven claims about Iraq’s WMD is undermining the popularity of Blair in the UK and is an embarrassment to Howard in Australia. But Bush’s popularity remains undiminished by the failure to find WMD in Iraq. Why? Are Americans qualitatively different to Britons and Australians or is the difference bound up in the way the war was presented through the media?

Even before Bush’s inauguration in 2000 he and his closest advisors were determined to invade Iraq. What he needed was the pretext which was provided by the September 11 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. The former NATO military chief, General Wesley Clark, now says that before he was due to go on CNN on September 11 he got a call at home from the White House which urged him to link Baghdad to the terror attacks. He said he declined to do so because he was offered no evidence of the connection. (Margo: Clark has since altered this statement, saying he was called by the group controlled by the Pentagon’s favourite Iraqi-in-exile Chalabi.)

By the time of the Iraq invasion in March 2003, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42 per cent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11 attacks and an ABC News poll found that 55 per cent of Americans believed that Hussein was directly linked to Al Qaeda. Arundhati Roy commented on these ill informed beliefs:

All of it based on insinuation, auto-suggestion, and outright lies circulated by the US corporate media, otherwise known as the ‘Free Press,’ that hollow pillar on which American democracy rests. Public support in the US for the war against Iraq was founded on a multi-tiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated by the US government and faithfully amplified by the corporate media.

The media did the Bush Administration’s dirty work. Why?

According to BBC Director, John Willis, who worked for a year as vice president in charge of national programs at WGBH in Boston, the ‘swamp of political cravenness’ which characterised the American coverage of the war was intrinsic to the media’s commercial structure, without the discipline imposed by a strong national public broadcaster. In a speech to the Royal Television Society in June 2003 Willis said:

The lesson from America is that, if news and public affairs are left purely to the market, it is most likely to give the government what it wants.

Reporting war may generate ratings, but it is not good for advertisers. Willis reported:

Chillingly, media consulting firm Frank Magid Associates warned that covering war protests might be harmful to a station’s bottom line. Another consultant urged radio stations to make listeners “cry, salute, get cold chills!” Go for the emotions, and air the national anthem each day. (Murdoch’s) Fox led the way as the military cheerleader, apparently giving both viewers and politicians what they wanted. Contra scandal star Oliver North reported on the ground for Fox. The success of Fox has pushed other stations to the right. There was little or no debate, America’s leaders remained unchallenged and any lack of patriotism was punished with McCarthyite vigour.

As Willis implies, the problem of the American broadcasting media’s failure to cover the issues leading up to the invasion of Iraq is far deeper than the bias of the corporate proprietors. It is unlikely they would have run such a one sided coverage of the Administration’s position in the run up to the invasion if the biased coverage had led to falling ratings and advertising revenue.

The commercial broadcasting media’s prime function is not even to entertain. It is to deliver consumers to advertisers in the right frame of mind to spend on the products and services advertised. This function always sits uncomfortably with broadcasting’s social responsibility to inform and educate. But as the media consultants quoted by Willis make clear, the commercial and social responsibilities of the broadcast media are never so far apart as during the build up to war, especially when the government case for war is built on lies and half truths which should be exposed by responsible reporting.

In circumstances like the build up to the invasion of Iraq, the responsibility of reporters is to deal with the facts, and the competing views surrounding those facts. Done properly, this approach to journalism is likely to unsettle the audience and make it less receptive to the message from advertisers.

For commercial broadcasters, concerned about the bottom line, investigative reporting about war can only occur it the war becomes unpopular due to an unacceptable level of American casualties. This in turn affected the way America conducted the war – with overwhelming firepower from a safe distance – which has ongoing implications for the safety of the occupying forces.

Unfortunately, the displacement of journalistic values by commercial values in the broadcast media is likely to get worse, not better, because of the push to relax media ownership laws in Australia, Canada and the UK, as well as in the US.

In all countries the argument advanced is the same. Developments in information technology have increased the number of broadcasting outlets, which means that competition will be sufficient to preserve media diversity, rather than ownership limits as at present. In none of these countries has there been any pressure from the public to relax media ownership regulation. If fact, to the extent that there has been any public interest, it has been distinctly hostile as people have a well-founded fear that the proposals would increase the reach and power of the major media conglomerates.

In Australia the latest attempt to change the media ownership laws failed in the Senate in June 2003. The Communications Minister, Senator Alston, gave the game away as to the real purpose of the legislation:

The tragic result is that Australian media companies will be denied the opportunity to grow and expand and will be left with little option but to resort to cutting costs and services.

Echoing the arguments made overseas, Alston claims:

Australians in 2003 can get their news and information from a wider range of sources than ever before – one in two households is connected to the Internet. Almost one third of households have pay TV. Digital TV is a reality. There are more community broadcasters than ever.

But Australian Broadcasting Authority research shows that the overwhelming majority of people rely on traditional media as their source of news and current affairs: 88 per cent rely on free-to-air television, 76 per cent use radio and newspapers and only 10 per cent use pay TV and 11 per cent use the Internet.

And where does the content for the pay TV and Internet services come from? According to a research paper by the Parliamentary Library (Media Ownership and Regulation in Australia by Kim Jackson), the content is controlled by existing media operators. The only significant new Australian news service provided by the pay TV operators is Sky News Australia. Sky is owned by the existing networks, Seven and Nine, and British Sky Broadcasting. The latter is owned by News Corporation:

The most popular Australian Internet news sites are also controlled by existing media operators, namely PBL (Packer), News Ltd (Murdoch), Fairfax (Publisher of the Age, SMH and Financial Review) and the ABC.

The only major new operator in Internet news is Telstra corporation. However Telstra’s Australian news service consists of AAP news stories. AAP is jointly controlled by News Ltd and Fairfax.

The Howard government threatens to reintroduce the legislation later this year and make it a trigger for a double dissolution. It may gain the Coalition the support of the media moguls at the next election. If passed it would allow, for instance, Packer to take control the Fairfax Group as well as the Nine Network, and allow Murdoch to bid for control of the Seven or Ten networks while retaining his 68 per cent control of the capital city and national newspaper market.

The new media merger rules announced by the American Republican-dominated Federal Communication Commission in a 3-2 decision in June 2003 abolishes the old rule which prevented TV-newspaper mergers and only allowed TV duopolies in the 60 largest markets if they passed rigorous public interest review. Now TV-newspaper mergers will be allowed in 200 markets where 98 per cent of the American population live, and TV duopolies and even ‘triopolies’ will be allowed in over 160 markets covering 95 of the population and there will be absolutely no public interest review of mergers.

According to the director of the US Center for Digital Democracy, Jerry Chester:

The companies behind the measure include the powerhouses of corporate media power: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp/Fox, General Electric/NBC, Viacom/CBS, Disney/ABC, Tribune Corp and Clear Channel. (Clear Channel owns 1,200 radio stations in the US and has an interest in Australian Radio Network with eight stations that give it an audience reach of 50 per cent of the population.)

According to Chester:

Not surprisingly, the media conglomerates thirst for more control as they seek to end ownership limits. What this means hasn’t been covered by the media. There has been no TV network news coverage on the impending media give-away.

Even so, there has been strong community resistance to the FCC policy and it may yet be blocked by Congress. If the new FCC rules stand, they are likely to have a profound impact on the structure of the broadcasting industry of other countries, unless those other countries can maintain strong domestic regulation designed to maintain national ownership of broadcasting and print media.

In the UK, the communications bill which promotes media deregulation along the lines proposed by the FCC in the US and Alston in Australia would allow US companies for the first time to buy into ITV or Channel Five. The bill lifts the ban on newspaper owners buying Channel Five. In theory Murdoch’s News Corp will be able to own four national newspapers as well as Channel Five and also remain the main shareholder in Sky, the leading pay-TV broadcaster.

The bill as initially proposed by the government was attacked by the former chief executive of British ITV, Stuart Prebble. He said:

It really is preposterous. Of all the many craven things this government has done in the past this is the most disgraceful. They seem to have allowed this bill to be written by Rupert Murdoch.

The House of Lords threatened defeat of the communications bill unless the government accepted an amendment, (known colloquially as the ‘Murdoch amendment’) drafted by Lord Puttman which calls for any takeover of Channel Five to be subject to a public interest test.

In Canada parliament responded to the pressure to open up its media with an inquiry by its standing committee on Canadian heritage (Our Cultural Sovereignty: The Second Century of Canadian Broadcasting) which rejected the changes proposed in the US, UK and Australia out of hand. In tabling the report in June 2003, the chairman of the committee, Clifford Lincoln, said:

The Committee believes that broadcasting is an essential preserve of the Canadian culture and imagination. Thus, it is opposed to increasing the level of foreign ownership. In essence, the Committee holds to the view that once Canadians give up control over what amounts to our cultural sovereignty, we can never get it back. The committee also took a strong position on the question of cross-media ownership, believing that Canadian democracy is enhanced when there is a diversity of voices and when Canadians have a wide variety of sources to choose from.

The Committee also looked at the structure of the industry to … place a strong emphasis on measures and incentives to ensure that Canadian audiences view Canadian programming. To this end they recommended the Canadian Television Fund be recognised by the government as a central component of the Canadian broadcasting system by directing licensees to contribute to the CTF.

It also recommended that the CBC (the national public broadcaster) “be provided with multi-year funding (3-5 years) so that it might adequately fulfil its mandate (and) the CBC deliver a strategic plan to parliament detailing resource requirements for the delivery of local, regional Canadian programming and new media initiatives”.

Of the group of countries under discussion, Canada is the only one which approached the challenge to broadcasting policy provided by the new digital technologies from the perspective of the interests of the audience. From that perspective Canada looked at the role commercial broadcasting might play and recognised the importance of a well-funded and independent public broadcaster in maintaining standards across all media.

In a functioning democracy, where its parliamentary representatives are concerned to deliver good government, voters should expect nothing less. The US, the UK, and Australia (aka the Coalition of the Willing) have all shown in varying degrees that they are in thrall to the media barons whose vested interests in this issue strike at the very heart of democracy.

Republished with permission

Margo disclosure: I am a member of Xmedia, a group formed recently to try to stop the new cross media legislation being passed by federal Parliament. I have campaigned and lobbied against any further concentration of media ownership in Australia for more than a decade. I am also a member of Friends of Fairfax, a group formed in the 1990s to keep Fairfax independent and stop it being taken over by Kerry Packer. I own shares in Fairfax. The Fairfax board supports Howard’s cross media legislation. For more information on the cross media saga, see Webdiary’s cross media archive.