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Amateur Night Corporate Media Is Partying Like It's 1984. By Susan Zakin
So much for taxonomy. As a born-again Pollyanna who's in touch with her terminal lack of sophistication, I am still recovering from a childhood steeped in other people's decadence. The upshot is that I really, really like New Year's Eve. I guess that makes me an amateur. New Year's Eve is--or should be--pure glitz. It has no religious overtones. (Thank God.) New Year's Eve is redolent of the Gilded Age, when the Vanderbilts built stone mansions in Newport and New York, had lots of excessive parties, and nobody felt guilty. The problem is that I think people should get it all out of their system at these big, noisy, Great Gatsby-type parties. Buckle up, East Egg! It's going to be a bumpy night! Yee-hah! Instead, what we've got is the worst of both worlds. We don't have good parties anymore, but the nouveau capitalists are dancing on our brains as frenetically as hopped-up San Francisco bike messengers, only without the awesome calf muscles and overutilized 3-D veins. This isn't just an aesthetic complaint. Untrammeled capitalism, particularly when it infects the media, is a poison pill for democracy. At least that's what Robert McChesney, a University of Wisconsin professor, writes in Rich Media, Poor Democracy. I think he's right. And this is not a passing cold or flu. This is the real thing. I had sort of sensed what was going on, the way changes in the zeitgeist seep into your consciousness, an ominously repeated logo here, a new telephone company there. It's happened to you, too. Suddenly you're dealing with Qwest instead of our old familiar pal U.S. Worst. Seems the two companies have merged. Soon you're barraged with commercials for Qwest wireless, stakeless, brushless, whatever. Qwest will do everything but walk your dog and wash your car. But they won't provide telephone service in rural areas, because they don't make as much money there as they do in cities. So a woman who works for the Cochise County sheriff can only reach her ailing father using a cell phone. The problem is that cell phone service down by the border is exceedingly unreliable, so half the time this woman doesn't know if her father is lying on the floor unable to move because he's had a stroke. Does Qwest care? Apparently not. You're an American; this is your little corner of globalization. Well, you might say, at least I'm not working in a sweatshop in Indonesia! I'm enjoying the fruits of all this free trade stuff! Look at all the bargains I'm getting at Wal-Mart! All true. But there is that funny little downside. It's called the commodification of civic life and it's truly scary. If you're in the media, it's hard to miss. Most of us poor schmucks got into this low-paying field because we wanted to be like Woodward and Bernstein. Take down a president or two. End a war. Whatever. Stand up for the little guy. We actually thought that journalism was the watchdog of democracy. How laughable this seems now. In Rich Media, Poor Democracy McChesney brilliantly blasts away the few remaining tatters of our illusions. (Note: If you buy it at a chain instead of Reader's Oasis, you might end up feeling awfully guilty.) According to McChesney, the average American consumed a whopping 11.8 hours of media per day in 1998, up over 13 percent in three years. But what kind of media are we consuming? Come on. 'Fess up. It's Entertainment Weekly, godawful local TV news and, if you're feeling sophisticated, maybe the souped-up advertorial (with Christopher Hitchens thrown in for incisiveness) in Vanity Fair. Surprise, surprise. Giganto companies like Time-Warner ($28 billion in revenues in 1998) aim all their considerable resources at the middle and upper middle class. Of course. Those are the people who buy things. As a result, "the affairs of working-class people have virtually disappeared from the news," writes McChesney. With Roseanne reduced to reruns, that pretty much means people who earn what you and I do are pretty damn near invisible. We don't count. But you knew that, right? The real cost to democracy is both enormous and insidious. With a steady diet of pap, Americans have become the political equivalent of a 700-pound man who can't get up from the couch. We are passive morons who don't even know the consequences of our vote, if we do vote. Remember all the "regular people" segments on the news coverage of the presidential campaign? Do you remember one single person who understood the difference between Bush and Gore on prescription drug coverage? I don't. "In the United States, we are told, people do not care about politics, especially left politics," McChesney writes. "One of the main arguments of this book is that the corporate media system, in conjunction with the broader trappings of a modern capitalist society, necessarily generate a depoliticized society." Many people don't even know what democracy is anymore, confusing majority rule with the right of corporations to run rampant. The media doesn't uncover corporate wrongdoing anymore because the giant corporations that run the media are too busy committing it. Rich Media, Poor Democracy is an important, scary book. We need to listen to McChesney. We also need to listen to old pros like Walter Cronkite, hardly a radical, who recently said: "Our big corporation owners, infected with the greed that marks the end of the 20th Century, stretch constantly for ever-increasing profit, condemning quality to take the hindmost ..." Cronkite added that these media megacorparations are "compromising journalistic integrity in the mad scramble for ratings and circulation." In a word, amateurs.
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