Big Media is killing us

15 posts / 0 new

Tue, 2011-09-27 14:43

Catchfire

I thought it might be nice to have a catch-all thread on the various ways Big Media tries to screw us. Here's a rather funny, if depressing, gaffe to start us off:

ITV documentary mistakes video game for secret IRA film

Quote:
Here’s an upload of a video from a recent ITV documentary into Colonel Gaddhafi’s support of the IRA. It contains shocking footage of a helicopter being shot down using weapons allegedly supplied by that baddie.

Except. Umm. It’s actually ArmA 2.

Words. Fail. What. How. For goodness sake. UK media, can you stop being shit please.

If you’re looking for the footage in the documentary in the ITV player – it’s online . The footage is in place from 28 minutes, 20 seconds.

Issues Pages:

Media Matters

Tue, 2011-09-27 16:06

6079_Smith_W

Well if we're going back to basics, anyone who is not familiar with the legacy of the Davey Commission and Kent Commission reports could probably start there:

http://journalism.ukings.ca/journalism_3719.html

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/publiceditor/article/925694--english-dave...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Commission_on_Newspapers

Why the Kent Commission has been trashed:

http://rrj.ca/m3557/

Tue, 2011-09-27 17:31

M. Spector M. Spector's picture

Those commission reports were quite limited in their scope, as was intended from the outset. They focused on concentration of ownership, which is hardly the biggest problem with the media in Canada. If we have half a dozen capitalist media outlets, it's not as if there's a wider range of opinion and selection of news than if we have only one or two corporations controlling them. The real problems with the bourgeois media are much deeper and broader than which capitalist owns which outlet.

The mainstream media are not in the business of informing the public, but of manipulating and entertaining it. They create a prevailing consensus about the world that infuses all their reporting and governs the way in which they cover and present the news. Thus all mainstream news outlets, including the "publicly" owned ones like CBC and TVO, operate from a set of assumptions that are never acknowledged, but always implicit.

For example, NATO is always a force for good; labour is always responsible for work stoppages; the military is virtuous and deserves everyone's support and admiration; federal and provincial governments are always well-meaning and responsible, even if they sometimes make "mistakes"; the wealthy and powerful deserve our respect; protest demonstrations are always assumed to be misguided and implicitly violent, making them worthy of any efforts to suppress them - unless of course they take place in countries whose regimes are not approved by our own government; skepticism, loaded language (dictator, strongman, ousted, tribalism, terrorist, insurgent, militant, etc.), and negative comments about personal habits and appearance are exclusively reserved for those foreigners who refuse to toe the line of the Washington consensus and the IMF, but are never used to refer to Canadian politicians or those of our allied countries.

None of this has anything to do with concentration of media ownership, and everything to do with the neoliberal consensus manufactured by the media in service of the ruling class.

Tue, 2011-09-27 20:48

6079_Smith_W

M. Spector wrote:

Those commission reports were quite limited in their scope, as was intended from the outset...

None of this has anything to do with concentration of media ownership, and everything to do with the neoliberal consensus manufactured by the media in service of the ruling class.

I am sure their conclusions seem quite mainstream compared to your position, M.Spector. I see it differently though.

In the first place I recommended the two reports because they do provide a good background to the history of Canadian media, and media concentration specifically.

And the two reports are important cornerstones of our media history.

The fact is though their findings did touch on issues of perspective and editorial freedom. They noted the swift crash in newspapers which occurred between 1911 (100 years ago) when there were 143 dailys - the highest number in Canadian history - to the situation 10 years later when one third of them had shut their doors.

That consolidation also marked the decline of a wide range of partisan journalism and the rise of the Canadian Press, and so-called objective reporting - the very control you are talking about, since it was hardly objective at all.

From the Davey Report:

"This country should no longer tolerate a situation where the public interest in so vital a field as information [is] dependent on the greed or goodwill of an extremely privileged group of businessmen" (Vol. 1: 67).

And it seems to me the topic is "Big Media". I think the "big" part might be an important aspect of that.

Tue, 2011-09-27 22:27

M. Spector M. Spector's picture

And yet we do continue to tolerate it.

Nothing substantive has improved since the Davey Report.

Wed, 2011-09-28 00:32

6079_Smith_W

If the only valid yardstick is how widely and successfully someone's ideas have been implemented then we should probably leave Mr Chomsky, Mr El Shabazz, Mr, Marx and a number of other writers unread as well.

I said for anyone "not familiar" with the basics might want to start there, because the two reports provide some good groundwork on Canadian media, and how things got the way they are today.

Clearly you are way beyond that, so you might not be so interested.

Wed, 2011-09-28 01:45

M. Spector M. Spector's picture

How did the MSM come to make us hate the people who are being oppressed and love the people who are doing the oppressing, to paraphrase Malcolm X?

You won't find an explanation of that in the Davey and Kent reports. They don't even begin to get into the "basics" of how the media lies to us and screws us.

For that kind of analysis you have to read Chomsky and Michael Parenti.

Sun, 2011-10-02 22:52

6079_Smith_W

Mon, 2011-10-03 09:34

Gaian

I've been googling up videos on Chris Hedges lately (he wrote for the NYTimes for 15 years) and he has a coherent explanation for how this perversion of liberal institutions was accomplished, beginning with the capitulation of liberalism after the First World War in the U.S.
His latest books do a wonderful job of explaining this.
Hedges and Bageant arrive at the same judgement from different social perspectives. Liberals have sold out and left a void, the Inverted Totalitarianism described by Sheldon Wolin.
The newer media use imagery dependent on excitement of the mind rather than presentation of verifiable fact - make use of psychology to overawe the simpler, untutored mind.
Like Moore, he points to the exceptionalism of some Canadian institutional action...and commiseration with some events, like the creation of "Fox north."

Mon, 2011-10-03 18:56

#10

Catchfire

The Occupy Wall Street Interview Fox Didn't Want You To See

Quote:
So, to recap, Fox News chose to air a video composed of snippets of Occupy Wall Street protesters speaking, giving various reasons for their presence at the rally, and then concluded that there was no unified reason for the protest. It neglected to air a video of one of the protesters making a lucid, reasoned argument for change and equality and holding Fox accountable for its behavior. Fair and balanced, as usual.

Mon, 2011-10-03 19:45

#11

Unionist

M. Spector wrote:

Nothing substantive has improved since the Davey Report.

Except perhaps for the internet, which has (unwittingly) become a vehicle, at least in its potential, for mass journalism on an undreamt-of scale - until the same wealthy few figure out how to control and suppress it.

Mon, 2011-10-03 20:04

#12

Northern Shoveler Northern Shoveler's picture

Unionist wrote:

Except perhaps for the internet, which has (unwittingly) become a vehicle, at least in its potential, for mass journalism on an undreamt-of scale - until the same wealthy few figure out how to control and suppress it.

They are working on that problem as we speak. They are already listening with their corporate embedded soft wear. Big Brother INC. is watching us while telling us to worry about the government.

Tue, 2011-10-04 08:58

#13

Gaian

Catchfire wrote:

The Occupy Wall Street Interview Fox Didn't Want You To See

Quote:
So, to recap, Fox News chose to air a video composed of snippets of Occupy Wall Street protesters speaking, giving various reasons for their presence at the rally, and then concluded that there was no unified reason for the protest. It neglected to air a video of one of the protesters making a lucid, reasoned argument for change and equality and holding Fox accountable for its behavior. Fair and balanced, as usual.

That old NYTimes newsman, Chris Hedges, also echoes the Davey Report in pointing to not only the errors of commission, but those of omission, that threaten the distortion of facts/reality.
And AlJazeera did a miserable job of "explaining" the protests yesterday, bringing forward a protester who was unable to say "Wall Street", let alone anything like "socialized debt," leaving it to a ratty apologist for the street to say there was no reason in the demonstrations. Those kids are truly babes in the wood.