|
How accurate are the accounts of national
and international events we receive from American media?
Do media corporations abridge our constitutional right to
a free press? Will we continue to have free access to information
on the Internet?
Driven by an insatiable appetite to increase
their bottom lines, mainstream media have cooperatively
joined ranks with government offices and agencies at the
highest federal levels, spinning off an intricate, seamless
politico-corporate media web of deception. Instead of protecting
against abuses of government power by keeping the public
adequately informed, they have become complicit in destabilizing
and undermining American democracy. From News Corporation's
Fox News, General Electric's NBC, Viacom's CBS, Disney's
ABC, and Time Warner's CNN to Clear Channel's massive radio
empire, what the mainstream media present as "news"
has become largely a "paid political announcement"
born of favor trading, conflict of interest, censorship,
and self-serving, bottom-line corporate logic.
Gone are the days of careful, independent
investigative reporting and in its stead is lock-step parroting
of official government sources. From the shoddy coverage
of evidence for WMDs in Iraq to the 2004 presidential election
campaign, it is small wonder that the corporate media are
reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them -- both in corporate-friendly
federal regulations on media ownership and in corporate
perks. (What's a military contract to supply jet engines
for the war in Iraq worth to GE, parent company of NBC!?)
The military-industrialist complex is old hat, but one dangerous
twist is that we no longer have an independent media. The
"Fox" is guarding the henhouse!
In this timely collection of essays by more
than a dozen of the nation's top media scholars, critics,
and journalists, including a preface by Arthur Kent, the
present media crisis is carefully exposed. Among the many
topics broached are methods of media manipulation and propagandizing:
the claim that the media is liberal; deregulation of media
ownership; alternative media; the threat to free access
to information on the Internet; the effects of media consolidation
on actors, producers, agents, managers, and lawyers in the
film industry; and the standardization of music and reduction
of localism in radio. The contributors include media critic
Eric Alterman, political analyst Michael Parenti, Mother
Jones publisher Jay Harris, the ACLU's Barry Steinhardt
and Jay Stanley, former Federal Communications Commission
chairman Reed Hundt, and many other distinguished commentators.
Not only do the contributors expose the
current crisis, but they also suggest solutions, pinpointing
legal and constitutional challenges, reviewing recent FCC
rulings and congressional legislation, and proposing structural
changes in the ways diverse media currently operate. For
any American who prizes democracy, this book is a clear
wake-up call to look more carefully behind the superficial
slogans to a free America and the stars and stripes strategically
displayed on the TV monitor.
Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D., is the director
of the Institute of Critical Thinking, the editor in chief
of the International Journal of Applied Philosophy,
and the author of many books on journalism, professional
ethics, and philosophical counseling, including Journalistic
Ethics (with Deni Elliot), Philosophical Issues in
Journalism, and What Would Aristotle Do? Self-Control
through the Power of Reason.
|
