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Viacom, owner of Paramount Pictures and cable television channels such as Showtime, MTV and Nickelodeon, announced Sept. 6 that it would buy CBS News for $37.3 billion.
It barely caused a ripple on Wall Street where these mega-mergers are commonplace. But it is a trend in the mass media that worries defenders of democracy. Back in 1983, Ben Bagdikian wrote his scathing "The Media Monopoly" exposing the domination by 50 giant conglomerates of broadcast news and entertainment, newspapers, magazines, books, music and the movie industry.
Now, according to Robert McChesney's just-published Rich Media, Poor Democracy (University of Illinois Press), a handful of 10 or 12 super-conglomerates exert an even tighter control. McChesney refers to just three of these Goliaths as the "Holy Trinity": Time-Warner, owner of CNN; Disney, which bought out ABC; and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, owner of Fox Television, 130 newspapers worldwide, Twentieth Century Fox, etc.
Another media conglomerate is GE, owner of NBC and one of the Pentagon's biggest weapons contractors, highlighting the tight interlock between the media and the military-industrial complex.
Murdoch, the Australian media mogul, was instrumental in the election of Margaret Thatcher as British Prime Minister helping set the stage for Ronald Reagan's election as president. Murdoch bought The Times of London, smashed the unions and turned the newspaper into a yellow journal promoting Thatcher's venomous anti-union brand of Toryism. It is an ideology that dominates both Britain and the U.S. to this day.
These mergers also reveal the degeneration of the news media into tabloid journalism laden with crime, violence and sex. The airwaves are clogged with escapism, news reduced to bad entertainment. With Disney producing these broadcasts, we should expect Mickey Mouse.
The racially divisive coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial and the sensationalism of the Monica Lewinsky affair dramatized this collapse of journalistic standards. On the other hand, serious stories, such as 44 million people without health care, are killed outright or distorted into arguments for cutbacks and privatization. Fightback movements, starting with organized labor, are ignored, belittled or slandered.
The common denominator in corporate news and entertainment is "dog-eat-dog" social Darwinism. Hollywood heroes like Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone single-handedly wipe out armies of bandits, usually Mexicans, Vietnamese or other peoples of color. They plant the idea that any problem will go away with enough ruthless firepower.
Vile racist stereotyping is the stock-in-trade of the media. The aim is to demolish any idea that we can only solve our myriad problems by peaceful means, by united, multiracial, collective action. That is too close to labor's ideology of working-class solidarity, an injury to one is an injury to all.
Why does the media saturate their news coverage with gun violence and street crime? Because it reinforces the lie that human beings - especially Black, Latino and poor working-class people - are innately criminal and can only be held in line by the unchecked police power of the state, by maximum surveillance and overcrowded jails. New York's scowling Mayor Rudolph Giuliani calls it "zero tolerance" and it is a long step toward fascism.
The concentration of media ownership has gone hand-in-hand with the tightening grip of right-wing extremist ideology. It is no accident that Pat Buchanan, a neo-fascist, is a fixture on CNN's "Crossfire." And when he left to run for president, neo-fascist Oliver North of Iran-contra ill-fame took his place. Even in areas where progress had been made, the media is now backsliding. The NAACP's convention denounced the fall lineup of television shows for not casting a single African American in a leading role - proof that racism is alive and well in the media boardrooms.
The corporate media plays a kingpin role in the drive to impose the so-called "New World Order." Closely integrated with the Pentagon, the media served as a megaphone for the staged NATO briefings during the air war against Serbia. The media uses its state-of-the-art technology to take viewers right into the cockpits of NATO warplanes. Turning a bloody war into a spectator sport, in which only the other side dies, is the ultimate in war propaganda, a trick that would make Joseph Goebbels green with envy.
McChesney cites the media's role in promoting consumerism with the line erased between news, entertainment and "infomercials." He calls it "hyper-commercialism." The media plays a role second only to "easy credit" in ameliorating the global crisis of capitalist overproduction. The media's job is to convince us to buy what we don't need and can't afford.
The ideologues of monopoly capitalism exalt buying above all other virtues, turning us into passive consumers rather than politically active, independent human beings.
Is there any hope of stopping this right-wing media juggernaut? The good news is that public opinion polls show a wide gap between the reactionary line peddled by the media and the views of the public.
As Michael Parenti put it in his book by the same name, the corporate media is "inventing reality." No matter how skillfully the media deceptions are woven, people live in the real world struggling to survive while the CEOs rake in billions. In that sense, truth is "on our side."
McChesney argues that the media conglomerates should be broken up and their monopoly control outlawed. He calls for the creation of a mass movement to fight for "public service" journalism such as the Canadian Broadcasting Company. The airwaves are in the public domain, free as the air itself, and no private corporation should "own" them.
Compelling the corporate media to provide fair coverage of the labor movement is part of the struggle and the AFL-CIO has had some success. Coverage of labor is more extensive and respectful since John Sweeney, Richard Trumka, and Linda Chavez-Thompson took the helm of the labor federation. But it is no substitute for the people's movements having their own media.
Why shouldn't the AFL-CIO have a weekly newspaper with 13 million subscribers, the AFL-CIO's current membership? The AFL-CIO, at its Los Angeles convention, adopted a program to make the Internet accessible to working-class people - a new front in the struggle for a democratic "interactive" mass media.
We are now celebrating the 75th anniversary of the founding in 1924 of our predecessor, the Daily Worker. The Worker won a place of honor in all the struggles of the American working class - the struggle to save Sacco and Vanzetti and the Scottsboro Nine; the epic CIO organizing drives in the mass production industries; the fight for the eight-hour day, unemployment compensation and Social Security; the struggle to defeat fascism; and the integration of major league baseball.
In more recent years, we have given partisan coverage of the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement and the struggles today to rebuild the labor movement. We are the "voice" of the working class. We have endured, no matter how hard our class enemy tried to silence us. Our task now is to transform the People's Weekly World into a mass circulation paper that reaches millions.
And now we have "Changing America," a half hour news program broadcast on 40 public access cable channels across the country. It demonstrates the potential for putting the stories of the American working class on the airwaves.
The Communist Party USA has 80 years of experience in the struggle for a pro-working-class media. Only when the working class has its own means of mass communication can it develop a consciousness of itself as an independent class with interests irreconcilable with those of the capitalist owners. It is the key to understanding its historic mission of ending the system of capitalist exploitation and establishing socialism.
We speak of Bill-of-Rights socialism and that means freedom of the press. In our view, the people's takeover of the mass media will be one of the first achievements of socialism. Racism and war propaganda would be banned.
There would be truthful coverage of the shortcomings of the new society with an airing of how to overcome them. There would also be a flowering of writing and broadcasting covering the grass-roots work of the people.
Labor will be honored as the source of all values and multiracial, multinational, multicultural diversity will be celebrated.