Illustration by Daniel J. Frey
December 2004
Global Media
Eight Corporations now control over 70% of the world’s media, and the future of democracy is at stake.
by Jerry Mander
We have entered an age of nearly total envelopment by media. As the late mass media critic Neil Postman once put it: “The tremendous power of media is the most crucial subject that we’re doing nothing about.” Maybe the difficulty most people have in grasping the scale and importance of the subject is that media offers itself as such a benign, friendly package: entertaining, colorful and, to some degree, informative, and it is all around us, part of our everyday lives.
Most important, media offers the illusion of transparency; it seems to be just a neutral window through which reality is passed on to us, rather than a set of technologies in the hands of specific people with specific intent who are often deeply engaged in choosing, creating and defining the realities we experience, which are then “entered” directly into millions of brains throughout the world.
Far from being a neutral window, media has a central role in influencing political, cultural, economic, social and environmental issues, and in determining whether people and communities will fully grasp the true situations they face, or what to do about them. As such, its proper functioning is fundamental to democratic societies.
Who Owns the Media?
The single most alarming fact about global media today is how few firms own and operate it. The degree of concentration of global media ownership rivals that of the oil industry. But the difference between concentration within the oil industry and within the media is that the former deals with tangible things, while the latter deals with consciousness. As such, it may be the central factor shaping how societies evolve, and whether any shred of democracy can survive.
In his seminal book, Rich Media Poor Democracy, leading media authority Robert McChesney of the University of Illinois, has compiled an extremely important set of statistics and analysis on global and domestic (U.S.) media concentration that has ominous implications for the future functioning of democracy.
As of 1999, says McChesney, only eight giant global corporations owned over 70% of global media. All global media. Not just television, but newspapers, magazines, radio, satellite systems, cable, book publishing, film production and distribution, movie theater chains, major aspects of the Internet, billboards, and theme parks.... These eight corporations are already capable of speaking to hundreds of millions of people on every continent on a daily and hourly basis, and they do.
The eight largest global giants are: AOL Time Warner, Disney, Fox News, Viacom, Seagram, General Electric, Sony, and Bertelsmann. The first three on that list own more than 50% of the combined total of the eight companies. And, with the exception of Bertelsmann, these same corporations also dominate the U.S. media market.
Such a degree of media concentration is not readily apparent to casual observation, since most local and even international affiliates continue to operate under other names. CNN, for example, is actually owned by AOL Time Warner, which also owns HBO, Court TV, Warner Brothers and Cinemax films, Time and Fortune magazines, among hundreds others. Disney owns ABC television and radio networks, and such global cable TV channels as ESPN, Lifetime, A&E, History, and E! Entertainment channels among hundreds of other networks and stations, and various other media ventures around the world. Fox News owns 22 U.S. TV stations, over 130 daily newspapers around the world, 23 magazines, British Sky TV, Asian Star satellite, and Latin Sky Broadcasting, among hundreds of other holdings.
Given such a situation, one might ask if there can possibly be a free enough flow of information for real democracy to survive? It would also be difficult to overstate the impacts of these few powerful corporations upon public opinion when major issues are in play, whether they are concerns with the environment, social policy or national elections.
A startling example of the problem became highly visible in the United States in early 2004, about nine months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. A national survey found that people who received their news and information from Fox News (as much as 40 percent of the population) had an entirely different view of the circumstances that led up to the war than people who read newspapers or watched other networks. Fox News has consistently shown a strong right-wing, pro-war leaning in its coverage. So the polls showed that 80 percent of Fox viewers believed at least one of the following: that there was a conspiratorial connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Queda terrorists, or that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, or that the majority of the world population supported U.S. activities there. Forty-five percent of Fox viewers believed all three, although it was already long after all other media and governments had accepted that there were no terrorists, no WMD, and little global support.
This is one of the thousands of examples one could use to demonstrate the degree to which public knowledge is directly derivative of slants taken by popular media. In this case, after an appalling period of unquestioning support for war policies, there developed some divergent voices within media. But in all too many cases there is not. And where there are no counter viewpoints — how could the public believe other than what it is told? Most events in media occur so far away from direct contact with viewers and the public, that the public is at great pains to have much of an independently-generated perspective. In the modern world, media has become the primary basis of public knowledge
As the adage goes, “who controls the media controls the world.”
The Reach and Power of Television and Advertising
According to the A.C. Nielsen Company as reported in Advertising Age, in 2002, 99.5 percent of American homes had television sets; 95 percent of the population watches at least some television every day, an apparent sign of their commitment, or addiction to it. The average home has a TV set playing for more than eight hours per day, even when no one is watching. The average adult viewer watches TV about four-and-a-half hours per day. The average child aged eight to 13 watches about four hours per day. At age two to four, they watch nearly three hours daily, not counting the television they see in school. (A lot of advertising is directed at this age group.) A recent report by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that not even infants are free of television, as about 20 percent of U.S. parents leave a TV on next to their baby’s crib, as it has some kind of hypnotic effect, keeping them quieter. (Many researchers have established this hypnotic affect as functioning to some degree in all age groups among heavy viewers; studies also show that small children, far from being quieted from TV, seem quieter only when watching and then revert to hyperactive behavior, caused by heavy viewing.)
Thinking about such statistics, they mean that roughly half the U.S. population is watching more than four hours per day. How is that even possible? (By heavy viewing every night, and then all weekend.) In the United States, people now watch more television than they do anything else in life besides sleep or work or going to school. (Neither have these figures changed since the advent of computers and the Internet; all they have done is add to the amount of time when people are engaged with information machines.) In the U.S., television viewing has become the main thing people do with their days. It’s replaced community life, family life, culture.
When hearing such figures on viewership, some people like to call television an expression of “popular culture;” somehow democratic. But television is anything but democratic. Viewers at home do not make television; they receive it. No one elected those eight giant corporations, or your local affiliates either. They occupy that position because of their corporate wealth, and because the airwaves, once considered public property open to all comers, have been nearly totally privatized.... Television expresses corporate culture, not popular culture.
Given these statistics, it is fair to say that ours is the first generation in history to have essentially moved its life inside media; to have replaced direct contact with other people, other communities and nature for simulated, recreated, or edited versions of events including news, that we can have little means of judging for their veracity. Television is the original “virtual reality.”
The situation verges on the bizarre, the stuff of science fiction. If an anthropologist arrived from Andromeda Galaxy, sent to study earth people, and he/she/it hovered over the U.S., chances are the report back home would go something like this: “They’re sitting night after night in dark rooms. They’re staring at a light. Their eyes are not moving. They’re not thinking. Their brains are in a passive/receptive state (measured as “alpha” for heavy viewers) and non-stop imagery is pouring into their brains — images from someplace where they are not, thousands of miles away. The images are being sent by a very small number of people, and they are of toothpaste and cars and guns and blood and people running around in bathing suits. The whole thing seems to be some kind of experiment in mind control.” And it just may be.
The act of watching TV is quickly replacing other ways of life and value systems. People everywhere are beginning to carry identical images, and are craving the same commodities, from cars to hairsprays to Barbie dolls to Palm Pilots. TV is turning everyone into everyone else. It’s cloning all cultures to be alike. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley envisioned this global cloning process taking place via drugs and genetic engineering. We have those too, but TV does it nearly as well, because of the medium’s reach and power.
We have the most powerful and pervasive communications system in history, dominated by a tiny handful of corporate people, describing how life should be lived. Is this good? Is it okay for billions of people to be receiving non-stop doses of powerful images and information controlled by such few sources, essentially telling them to be unhappy about their own cultures and values — how they live and who they are, to get onto the commodity treadmill, to put their trust in corporations, and to embrace a global homogenization of Western values? Will this bring a sustainable, equitable society? Many think not.
Media Reform
John Nichols and Robert McChesney have written that “local media activism is the foundation of the media reform movement, and there is much that can be done at the local level. As the Christian Coalition recognized a decade ago, an effective national movement has as much to do with school board races as presidential nominations. This is even more true when it comes to media reform.” Challenges to local media coverage, or to proposed consolidations of media, or to buyouts of local media by distant corporations, or to offensive advertising, can all be effective if well organized. All media are inherently responsive to public complaints, especially if significant in number.
Take the case of Denver’s Rocky Mountain Media Watch, which provides people the tools to be effective campaigners impacting local media. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has also adopted useful organizing models to stimulate local discussion groups, mass campaigns and letter writing, as well as Internet responses. These have brought significant responses against media mergers, sales of newspapers and coverage of issues of import to local communities.
Impacting the dominant media today will certainly not be easy, but it is crucial. The first step is the most important — to recognize that the media must be made a primary part of the program of all groups interested in democratic action — whether on labor issues, children’s issues, the environment, public health, safe food, etc.
No victory will be possible on any of these issues without diminishing the oppressive voice of the dominant media, and increasing the opposing voices from public broadcasting, and alternative media.
Jerry Mander is co-editor, with John Cavanagh, of the just released, expanded edition of Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World is Possible, published by Berrett-Koehler (a complete version of this essay appears there). He is also a senior fellow at the Public Media Center and president of the International Forum on Globalization.
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