Why Are We Still Listening? |
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Part II in the series, What Else Are You Selling Me? |
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| By TRISTAN AHTONE |
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| I have to say that before
you read this, you may get angry. Maybe people just don’t want to start looking
for solutions until it happens to them. Maybe when you, or I, realize
that we will never have children because our organs have been permanently
destroyed or mutated, we will get the message. Mothers no longer have the ability to produce children,
the greatest gift anyone can have, and we have not heard anything about
it because the same corporation that took that gift, owns the media
outlets that should be reporting about it. Maybe when our children can
no longer drink fresh water or see more than archival pictures of forests,
we will realize something is wrong. When we cannot eat food that has
not been genetically modified, we will see that something has gone awry.
When we find that nearly every aspect of our lives has been marketed
and taken from us, maybe then we will take a stand and say, enough.
Perhaps our lack of action or realization is our inherent
selfishness, or perhaps it’s what we have been taught. Either way,
one day, one of us, either me or you who are reading this, will be a
victim of this corporate recklessness, and all I can say is, I’m
sorry. My heart aches for you just thinking it might happen. I’m
sorry. To pick up a little from where we left off last time,
the following corporations own each one of these media outlets: 1. AOL—Time–Warner: HBO, Cinemax,
Comedy Central, Time Inc, Time Magazine, SportsIllustrated, People,
Entertainment Weekly, Fortune, Money, Business 2.0, Southern Living,
Popular Science, Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, Parenting, Family Life
+ (43 other magazines), Time – Warner Trade Publishing, IPublish.com,
Little, Brown and Company, Warner Books, Warner Music (Roger Ames),
Atlantic Records, Elektra Entertainment, London-Sire Records, Rhino
Entertainment, Warner Brothers Records, Columbia House, Maverick Records,
RuffNation Records, Strictly Rhythm Records, Sub Pop Records, Tommy
Boy Records + (10 other recording companies), Warner Brothers Studios,
Warner Brothers Pictures, Warner Brothers Television, Warner Brothers
Animation, Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbara, Castle Rock Entertainment, Telepictures
Productions, Warner Home Video, MAD Magazine, DC Comics, New Line Cinema,
Fine Line Features+ (5 other studio production companies), Time-Warner
Cable, Turner Broadcasting, The WB! Television Network, CNN, TBS Superstation,
Turner Network Television, Cartoon Network, Turner Classic Movies, Court
TV, Atlanta Braves, Atlanta Hawks, Atlanta Thrashers, America On-Line,
Compuserve, Digital City, Digital Marketing, ICQ, IPlanet, Mapquest,
Moviefone, Netscape. 2. Walt Disney Company: Walt Disney
Studios, Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures,
Caravan Pictures, Capital Cities, ABC, ABC Television Network, ABC World
News Tonight, ABC Family Channel, Fox Family Channel, Saban Entertainment,
Disney Channel, The Soap Network, Toon Disney, ESPN, Lifetime Television,
A & E Networks, The History Channel, The Biography Channel, The
Style Channel, E! Entertainment, Fairchild Publications, Chilton Publications,
Diversified Publishing Group, Miramax Films, Walt Disney Television,
Touchstone Television, Buena Vista Television, Go.com, Infoseek. 3. CBS – Viacom: Paramount Pictures,
Paramount Home Entertainment, CBS, CBS Television Network, Special Events
Coverage, CBS Evening News With Dan Rather, CBS Early Show, CBS Radio,
Infinity Broadcasting, Group W, Country Music Television, Nashville
Network, Viacom Television Stations Group, Paramount Television, United
Paramount Network (UPN), United Cinemas International, Famous Players,
Blockbuster, Paramount Parks, Showtime, MTV, The Music Factory - Netherlands,
MTV Dance – Britain, MTV Live – Scandinavia, Cecchi Gori Communications
– Italy, Nickelodeon, VH-1, TV Land, Noggin, Comedy Central (jointly
owned), The Movie Channel, Country Music Television, Flix, The Sundance
Channel (jointly owned), Simon and Schuster, Scribner, The Free Press,
Pocket Books, Spelling Productions, Famous Music. 4. Vivendi: Seagrams Gin Company, Ltd,
Universal Studios, Universal Music, Farmclub.com, Interscope Geffen
A&M Records, Island Def Jam Records, MCA Records, Motown Records,
Mercury Nashville, Verve Music Group, Lost Highway Records, PolyGram
Records, Deutsche Grammophon, Decca-London, Philips, Computer Games,
Blizzard Entertainment, Sierra, Universal Interactive, Flipside Network. 5. News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch):
News Corp Publishing, Harper Collins, William Morrow and Company, Avon
Books, Amistad Press, Fourth Estate, Fox Cable, FX, Los Angeles Dodgers,
National Geographic Channel, Fox Magazines, The Weekly Standard, Fox
Television Network, BskyB, Channel(V), Sky Perfect TV, STAR, Stream,
20th Century Fox Films, Blue Sky Studios, Fox 2000, Fox Entertainment,
New York Post, TV Guide, Festival Records, Mushroom Records, [16 Australian
and 9 British newspapers as well]. 6. General Electric: NBC, Dateline NBC,
NBC Entertainment, Today Show, NBC Nightly News, Columbia Tri-Star Pictures,
RCA The idea that government, corporations, and media are
all intrinsically intertwined is not new, yet why do so few believe
it, or for that matter look into it for themselves? After some intensive
searching what I found was very disheartening, if not Orwellian in nature. General Electric’s Political Connections To pick on General Electric first: In 2002, GE received
a defense contract worth $1.9 billion from the U.S. Department of Navy.
The contract was for the purchase of 480 F414-GE-400 engines used in
the air fighter plane known as the Blacker and in F/A-18E/F Super Hornet
Strike Fighters, and an order for 13 spares and modules for the U.S.
Navy F/A-18E/F Super Hornet Strike Fighter. While GE specializes in media outlets, they also specialize
in weapons parts. And while this would make GE a prime candidate for
developing the engines for the Super Hornet Strike Fighter and Blacker,
it may have also had a slight inside track from campaign contributions.
According to the GE Workers United website, GE contributions
can be broken down by presidential, U.S. Senate, and U.S. House of Representative
races: “GE PAC contributed $268,500 to House Democratic candidates
and $357,900 to House Republican candidates, $100,600 to Senate Democratic
candidates and $147,500 to Senate Republican candidates. In addition,
GE gave $5,000 to the George Bush campaign. The Company also put up
$100,000 for the elaborate inauguration ceremonies for the new president.
No money was given to Democratic presidential candidates.” General Electric, No Friend to Humanity In 1998, GE was ordered to pay $200 million in damages
for its pollution of the Housatonic River in Massachusetts. The payment
was for GE’s use and disposal of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB’s)
from their plant in Pittsfield, now a holding area for toxic chemicals
and river sediment drudged from the Housatonic. The closed-down plant,
incidentally, sits within 50 feet of an elementary school. PCB’s
have been known to cause immunal changes, behavioral alterations, and
impaired reproduction, and to affect both humans and animals, bind strongly
to soil, and travel long distances in air and water. PCB’s are
found in plant and animal life forms that have been exposed to them
and later in humans who eat the plants and animals. Most tests to find out what effect PCB’s has on
children were conducted on mothers who had eaten fish contaminated with
PCB’s. At the time, the lawsuit was pushed by the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA), but today, GE may not have to worry about such
strict rules with Bush’s new appointments to such government positions
like that of the EPA. Upon entering office, the Bush administration nominated
Linda Fisher to be deputy director of the EPA; unfortunately (or maybe
fortunately), she only became deputy administrator. If you are not familiar
with Fisher, you may be familiar with the chemical company, Monsanto,
which has been fingered by the EPA for being the responsible party for
the contamination of no less than 93 sites. Fisher used to lobby for
the company. The Media Link While Fisher and Monsanto don’t necessarily have
anything to do with the media, Bush’s other appointments do. The
fourteen-member panel of the commission for the reform of Social Security
includes Richard Parsons, co-chief operating officer of AOL-Time Warner.
Secretary of State Colin Powell was a former board member of America
Online, while his son Michael, head of the Federal Communications Commission,
in 2000, finally voted to approve the merger between AOL and Time Warner,
the largest media merger in history. While this may not be totally shocking, one could sum
up that the media outlets that Time Warner owned finally merged with
the Internet technology that AOL owned. When the Internet, promoted
as being the thing that would break up industry and media monopoly,
is more or less dominated by one company with a distinct hold on other
major media outlets, it creates a shrinking effect in cyberspace. The Internet, therefore, has not necessarily failed
to break up the power elite; it just seems that the power elite found
a loophole to take it back. As a result of the merger, 2,400 employees
were axed from the two companies, yet in corporate America, poor labor
relations are always just around the corner, and in some of the happiest
places on earth. Disney’s Sweat Shops For decades, Disney has marketed to children around
the world with such characters as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and newer
characters, such as Aladdin and Pocahontas. Yet while children seem
to be the target audience, they along with women are also used as slaves
to make Disney’s products. For the last eight years Disney has sold shirts for
$17.99 a piece. The shirts only cost them fifteen cents each to produce.
At least that’s what the workers got paid per shirt. Workers in
Bangladesh were forced to work for Disney for fifteen hours a day, seven
days a week and then were beaten. Once workers organized for their rights,
Disney pulled its work from the factory and dumped the women on the
street. Disney has still not returned to Bangladesh. Ongoing Exploitation Children in Haiti can expect to make seven cents per
pair of Pocahontas pajamas that they sew. Disney then sells them at
a price well over ten dollars. And don’t even get started on the
Pocahontas thing either. It’s bad enough that we have to have the
word, American, tacked onto any set of words used to describe us like
American Indian or Native American after being nearly wiped out by Americans,
but then to have new generations of Americans try to re-write their
history just to feel better about their crimes is even worse. So they
killed us off, made movies about us that weren’t true, and made
children in Third World countries work as slaves to make the products
to sell to the descendents of the people who killed us off. It’s kind of sick in a historical context; the
moral sense is something totally different. Yet Disney’s response
to sweatshop work has been far from satisfactory. After Kathy Lee Gifford,
from “Live with Regis and Kathy Lee” on ABC, suddenly discovered
her clothing line was made in sweatshops, ABC mounted a campaign to
save her image. If you missed the above, ABC is owned by Disney. ABC’s “Primetime” attempted to bolster
Gifford’s image by focusing on her charity work. No doubt Disney
would love to change labor laws here to continue their child exploitation.
Unfortunately, when it comes to changing laws to fit corporate needs,
Disney is not as lucky as Viacom. The Media Control of Viacom Once Viacom acquired CBS, it was faced with federal
law stating that no corporation can own two national television networks.
Since Viacom owned UPN also, it was faced with the tough laws of the
FCC. Luckily for Viacom, after a little lobbying the FCC decided to
help the media giant out and change federal law. However, the merger
didn’t only change the laws, it raised some interesting issues.
In 1999, when the merger was announced, Viacom was
poised to become the largest media conglomerate in the world as AOL
and Time Warner had not yet jumped in bed together, and lots of people
were very nervous. In a Society of Professional Journalists paper examining
the merger, professor and reporter Edwin Diamond was quoted as saying:
“TV news has become too money-making to be left to news people.
More and more, Wall Street sits in the executive producer’s chair
. . .When news went public and had to answer to stockholders with higher
profits, the picture changed and newsroom budgets began to be squeezed
to increase profits. . . . The result is often passive news, soft news,
personality news, crime news, and news as entertainment.” Yet viewpoints on why this merger might be bad for
the general public seemed to only be voiced on obscure websites. And
while this merger was only the first in a series that has occurred,
and will most likely continue to occur, Viacom has been nice enough
to stick with only one forte: media control. Simple media control, however, is not enough for some
other companies, as in the case of Vivendi. For Vivendi outright control
of natural resources and media outlets is on the agenda. Your Water is Now in Vivendi’s Hands Within the last ten years Vivendi, along with three
other global corporations, has helped privatize water and now helps
supply nearly 300 million people in every continent through their enterprise,
Vivendi Environment. Water privatization is usually accomplished with the
help of the World Bank, whose loans to struggling and Third World countries
often require concessions, such as water privatization. For the World
Bank, these are often known as “water supply” loans, and currently
out of 276 loans the World Bank has given to governments, water privatization
has been a requirement in about one-third of the loans. Privatization as a condition to government loans from
the World Bank has tripled between 1990 and 2002. The World Bank is
a development assistance organization aiming to help the poorest people
in the poorest countries, while establishing incentives for development
in the private sector. Vivendi has developed nicely from it. News Corporation: The Business of Censorship While Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corporation, publicly
backed the war efforts of George Bush and Tony Blair in an interview
in February, his views on what we should or shouldn’t see are much
more ominous. In 1997, in exchange for his Asian-based Star TV, Murdoch
agreed to drop the BBC news from broadcast in China, as many of their
reports were critical of Beijing. Murdoch has also been responsible
for killing the publication of a book critical of China by Chris Patten,
and another book critical of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas,
in which authors concluded that Anita Hill had told the truth. After a request from the White House for censorship
during wartime, mainly of videos that contained speeches by Osama Bin
Laden, Murdoch acquiesced and was quoted as saying, "We'll do whatever
is our patriotic duty." Do I really need to say anymore? What can be more disconcerting
than the free press finally doing whatever is their patriotic duty,
especially by censoring information? But the fun doesn’t stop there,
let’s look at Henry Kissinger. Murdoch and Kissinger: Symbiosis as Survival in
the Public Eye In 1997, Henry Kissinger was kind enough to present
the humanitarian of the year award to Rupert Murdoch, and while Murdoch
receiving a humanitarian award after his track record of censorship
in the media is funny, Kissinger giving a humanitarian award is even
funnier. If you don’t remember Kissinger’s crimes against
humanity when he was secretary of state, here’s a little snippet
from Christopher Hitchens, author of “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,”
which has now been made into a documentary movie: VIETNAM One might think that Kissinger is the perfect man to
give away a humanitarian award; after all, he did win the Nobel peace
prize in 1973 along with Le Duc Tho, peace talk spokesperson for the
Communist Party of Vietnam in 1973. Le Duc Tho turned down his prize
saying that hope for peace was premature, while many were saddened to
see that Pol Pot, Suharto and Pinochet could not make the award ceremony
for Kissinger. Kissinger may still face extradition to Chile for questioning
regarding the overthrow, but his luck has held out after narrowly escaping
the clutches of French and Spanish courts for the same crime. Along
with numerous lawsuits and accusations well chronicled and documented
in everything from the “New York Times” to the “Irish
Times” (while surprisingly absent from Murdoch news outlets), Kissinger
appears to be a man on the run with only the international community
attempting to hold him responsible for his crimes. Yet the irony continues. Two months after the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush named Henry
Kissinger to an independent panel to investigate U.S. intelligence failures
that may have led to September 11. Appropriating “Ground Zero” As a result of those airplanes-turned-cruise-missiles,
the American flag has been flown furiously in some sort of hope that
the flag might save us. The news media was quick to connect two skyscrapers
and a five-sided building with Old Glory and ideas of patriotism. While the victims played the major role on television,
they were exploited in the most sickening way as the term “ground
zero” began to hit the airwaves. Even now if you run the words
“ground zero” through the Internet, any reference to Hiroshima,
Nagasaki, or any sort of nuclear test has been totally buried under
references to September 11. To equate the pain and suffering of the
survivors and family members of September 11 to the pain of using nuclear
weapons on civilian populations is very disturbing. Even today after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, which resulted in an estimated death toll of up to 340,000
people, Americans still feel the need to exploit and debase the memories
of other victims to make theirs feel more tragic, more heartfelt, more
real and more isolated. In 1945, 340,000 civilians died in Japan because
of America, and Americans have the audacity to compare themselves to
the pain and suffering of those people. What is more revolting is that seven months prior to
the world entering the nuclear age, President Roosevelt received a 40-page
report from General Douglass MacArthur containing five separate steps
the Japanese would take to surrender. In other words, the use of nuclear
weapons was not necessary. The steps were nearly identical to those
the Japanese accepted on September 2, 1945, after the subsequent nuclear
holocaust its people experienced. Why did the American public not know this until a newspaper
article was released about it ten days after Nagasaki? The answer: Self-imposed
wartime censorship. Reporter Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune obtained
the memorandum from Presidential Chief of Staff Admiral William D. Leahy,
and while some have questioned the authenticity of the memorandum, neither
the White House or State Department ever challenged the article, and
General MacArthur later confirmed the article’s accuracy. The Media: Watchdogs or Cheerleaders? So what role does the media play? Historically, it
has been the cheerleader for big business and government. And being
that the two seem so inexplicably intertwined, it seems that it has
only been invested in the interests of the elite. The same people to whom the President gave a $1.3 billion
tax cut are the same people that exploit their workers, making the rest
of the population (the other 99%) shoulder what they don’t have
to pay. These people are the ones that pick what you watch, what information
you absorb, and in the long run, most likely make our foreign policy
decisions. From the global policy forum, a group which monitors
the United Nations Security Council, the following statement on Iraq
was written around 1999: Iraq has the world’s second largest proven oil
reserves. According to oil industry experts, new exploration will probably
raise Iraq’s reserves to 2-300 billion barrels of high-grade crude,
extraordinarily cheap to produce, leading to a gold-rush of profits
for international oil firms in a post-Saddam setting. The four giant
firms located in the US and the UK have been keen to get back into Iraq,
from which they were excluded with the nationalization of 1972. They
face companies from France, Russia, China, Japan and elsewhere, who
already have major concessions. But in a post-war military governments,
imposed by Washington, the US-UK companies expect to overcome their
rivals and gain the most lucrative oil deals that will be worth hundreds
of billions, even trillions of dollars in profits in the coming decades. BIA – Bureau of Iraqi Affairs? Possibly this group is wrong. If they were right, they
would be on television for sure, right? But they are most likely wrong.
Colin Powell said the U.S. would hold Iraqi oil “in trust”
for the Iraqi people. Note the quotation marks around “in trust.”
I have not been able to locate one news article that did not have these
words in quotation marks, let alone a description of what this sort
of trust is. As it is, if oil in Iraq will be used for the benefit
of Iraqi people, what about the oil in Alaska, Oklahoma, Texas and other
places? I still haven’t received any sort of benefit from oil extraction
that has taken place in this country. Regardless, if the Iraqi “trust”
is anything like the Indian trust funds initiated by the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, you know it won’t ever make it to the Iraqi people. Maybe you missed that story, too, though. Remember
when the Secretary of Interior couldn’t find nearly $100 billion
that was supposed to be held “in trust” for Native people?
So what role does the media play? And why are we still listening?
Copyright © 2003 IAIA Chronicle Check out the original article at IAIACHRONICLE.ORG
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