EDucate! - Education

Can you share some of your general perspectives on the media vis-a-vis social change and democracy?

I think it is important to understand that we cannot treat the media as some kind of autonomous entity. Media sectors interpenetrate in various ways, but overall the media are overwhelmingly structured by the state and function, by and large, to service the interests of capital. I would begin by arguing that the current commercialization of broadcasting actually substantially undercuts public systems of communication. Public systems of communication are really at the mercy of the market.

Today, it appears as if the hypertrophy of financial capital has become the functional grid in which media economies are secured. We need to understand that media serve the interests of national capital and its hydra-headed entanglements with transnational economic relations. So that the media need to win the support of the transnational money markets. I would argue that it is impossible for the media to foster democratic social relations when they do not challenge the principle of private ownership and profit. If the media and the capitalist state work hand-in-glove, how is it possible for the media to really be an instrument for helping the poor and powerless in the world? We live in precarious and ominous times.

The destinies of the media – and the ideological interests that they serve – are interlocked with the vagaries of the ‘free’ market. When you begin to comprehend the enormous power and global reach of the U.S. media, the challenge becomes overwhelming. The media cartel of AOL Time Warner, Disney, General Electric, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, Sony, Bertelsmann, AT&T, and Liberty Media do their best to ensure that the news media continue in their role as the servants of the dominant ideological instruments. That, and the fact that the majority of public broadcasting outlets in the U.S. rely on large corporate-backed think-tanks to offer ‘expert’ opinions to their audiences, are just a few of the reasons why the United States population has been so willing to give up its long-cherished democratic freedoms.

On a global scale, the media serve to mystify the process of human value production. Social relations linked to capitalist production are glossed over and never explained in terms of the consequences that they have for the powerless and the poor. According to Mark Crispin Miller, the cartel’s favorite audience is that stratum of the population most desirable to advertisers. Thus, we are faced with the media’s complete abandonment of working people and the poor. Traditionally, the role of the press has been to protect us against those who would abuse the powers of government. However, the current media cartel is unwilling to take on the powers that be. Why should they? Their value systems are too similar and the powers that be share their own interest in the accumulation of surplus value. As Miller notes, media journalists now appear to work against the public interest – and for their parent companies, their advertisers and the political administration that holds sway in Washington. Miller argues, and I agree, that we have to take bold steps in order to liberate the media from oligopoly, so as to make the government our own.

Don’t regulations exist to help prevent the formation of cartels?

Yes, but historically they have been ignored. And now they are being overturned altogether. A few weeks ago, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals overturned one of the country’s last-remaining regulatory protections against media monopoly. According to a report from FAIR, the court overturned the rule that had prevented one company from owning both television stations and cable franchises in a single market. The court also ordered that the FCC either justify or rewrite the rule that bars a company from owning television stations which reach more than 35 percent of U.S. households, stating that as is, the rule is arbitrary and illegal. If you look at the broadcast TV markets in the United States, one-seventh are monopolies, one-quarter are duopolies, one-half are tight oligopolies, and the rest are moderately concentrated. In addition, while the number of TV stations has increased from 952 to 1,678 between 1975 and 2000, the number of station owners in the same period of time has actually declined from 543 to 360. Let me give you an example of what a media monopoly can do. One of the primary ideological vehicles of the new media mafia is Fox News. Fox News Channel and 26 television states are owned outright by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Fox News is rapidly gaining a wide and committed audience on the basis of its appeal to right-wing male viewers. Its political catechism is spiked with testosterone and rage and gives ballast to the logic of transnational capitalism and U.S. militarism.

The corporate media have driven out any hope for even left-liberal news coverage or commentary in the United States. The truth is that the so-called ‘leftists’ are, at their most extreme, ‘centrists’ and more often than not tilt politically to the right. With virtually no leftist representation in the media, the U.S. public are being ideologically massaged by opinions and positions that serve the interests of the ruling class. The myth of the liberal media talked about so much by right-wing pundits is simply a lie (Extra! July/August, 1998).

But the worst offenders in the media are organizations like National Public Radio. On January 10, FAIR [Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting] put out an Action Alert asking people to write to National Public Radio about the politics of its Middle East reporting. NPR had been referring to the situation in Israel and Palestine around the New Year as a period of ‘relative calm’ or ‘comparative quiet’. NPR went on to clarify this description by noting that ‘only one Israeli has been killed in those three weeks’. What NPR failed to acknowledge was that during this ‘quiet’ period, an average of one Palestinian per day was being killed by Israeli. (See http://www.fair.org/activism/npr-israel-quiet.html.) Despite protests organized by FAIR, this distortion continues to be repeated. But think about it, the left in the United States does not have a lot of money behind it. Do you know how much it costs to enter the national media market, let alone the international market?

How is the struggle for media reform linked to the larger struggle for democracy?

There is no question in my mind that the struggle for media reform is an essential part of the struggle for democracy. McChesney and Nichols (2002, pp. 16-17) have argued that media reform proposals need to apply existing anti-monopoly laws to the media; restrict ownership of radio stations to one or two per owner; fight the monopolization of TV – station ownership, break the lock of newspaper chains on entire regions, create reasonable media ownership regulations, establish a full range of low-power, noncommercial radio and television stations across the globe; invest in public broadcasting so as to eliminate commercial pressures and to serve low-income communities; allow tax credits to any non-profit medium; lower mailing costs for nonprofit and significantly non-commercial publications; eliminate political candidate advertising as a condition of a broadcast license; require that stations who run paid political broadcasts by politicians run free adds of similar length from all the other candidates on the ballots immediately afterward; reduce or eliminate TV advertising directed at children under 12; and decommercialize local TV news with regulations that require stations to grant journalists an hour daily of commercial-free news times; and set budget guidelines for those newscasts based on a percentage of the station’s revenues.

In his magisterial work, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, Robert McChesney writes that media reform cannot be successful if isolated from other struggles for democracy. He writes that media reform will not, and cannot, be won in isolation from broader democratic reform. He argues that the only way to gain some control over media and communication from the giant firms that overrun the field will be to mobilize some kind of a popular movement. He also notes that while media reform is a cornerstone for any type of democratic movement, it is not enough. This must be accompanied by electoral reform, workers’ rights, civil rights, environmental protection, health care, tax reform, and education. In other words, McChesney links media reform to the larger struggle for democracy. In this sense his advice is similar to that of Chomsky and Edward Herman, both of whom I greatly admire, along with McChesney.

What about information technologies?

Well, I believe that information technologies – when they are embedded heart and soul in the capitalist marketplace – can actually increase alienation in the sense of commodifying information. A marketplace – even one that has been digitalized – is still a marketplace. The digitalized information systems so necessary to capital helps to speed up its circulation and production. The speeding up of circulation and production does little, however, to de-mystify the world and in fact creates mystification at a higher register. On the other hand, alternative media that challenge marketplace values are very important in the struggle for democracy. Magazines like yours (EDucate!), Z Magazine, Covert Action Quarterly, High Times – as well as many Internet magazines – all of these publications are crucial in providing information and analysis crucial to challenging dominant ideological and political interests. Can the new media technologies create, through forms of cyberactivism, a new global ‘cognitariat’ capable of challenging capital’s law of value and the digital networks of the international financial system? Let’s just say that I am hopeful but not optimistic.

What can radical educators do?

Wherever and whenever possible, radical educators have been implementing critical media literacy classes in high school and university classrooms. Examining the politics surrounding media policy and practices from a historical materialist perspective (i.e., looking at the media in the context of the creation of a transnational capitalist class), critical media literacy educators also employ a critical semiotics to analyze the media as a form of popular culture – a popular culture that carries a lot of unexamined ideological freight; it investigates the form and content of commercial broadcasting; and it examines representations of race, class, gender, and sexual relations as a form of ideological production.

I have students at UCLA who work in working-class communities, helping young people create their own media representations of themselves and their communities through alternative media. Of course, examining the media critically and creating alternative views – especially with respect to the Bush administration’s war on terrorism – at this particular historical juncture, in the United States, risks charges of anti-patriotism. Yet, from a critical perspective one could argue that patriotism that is not at the same time conjugated with introspection, sustained critical self-reflexivity, and the possibility of transcending the reified knowledge and social relations of the corporate capitalist state, is a patriotism that does an injustice to the meaning of the word.

One of the best features of a democracy lies in its provisions for the ability to be self-critical, to challenge, or affirm, as the case may be, what has been presented by the dominant capitalist media as commonsense. That feature has been effectively eroded by increasing corporate control of the media. Democracy cannot exist in a society whose media are owned and run by the transnational capitalist elite. From where I stand, a socialist alternative is the only possibility for democracy to be secured.

References

Coen, Rachel. (2002). New York Times Buries Stories of Airstrikes on Civilians. Extra! Update. February, p. 3. Cummins, Bruce. (2002). Reflections on ‘Containment’. The Nation, vol. 274, no. 8, pp. 19-23.

FAIR-L, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting Media analysis, critiques and activism, ACTION ALERT: Media Giants Cast Aside Regulatory “Chains”: FCC should resist attempt to gut ownership restrictions, March 1, 2002 Field Guide to TV’s Lukewarm Liberals. (1998). Extra! Vol. 11, no. 4 (July/August).

Hart, Peter, and Ackerman, Seth. (2001). Patriotism & Censorship. Extra! Vol. 14, no. 6 (December), pp. 6-9. Hart, Peter. (2001). No Spin Zone? Extra! Vol. 14, no. 6 (December), p. 8.

Massing, Michael. (2002). Black Hawk Downer. The Nation, vol. 274, no. 7 (February 25), pp. 5-6, p. 23.

McChesney, Robert W. E (1999). Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communications Politics in Dubious Times. New York: The New Press.

McChesney, Robert W.E., and Nichols, John. (2002). g The Making of a Movement: Getting Serious About Media Reform. The Nation, vol. 274, no. 1, (January 7/14), pp. 11-17.

Miller, Mark Crispin. (2002). What’s Wrong With This Picture? The Nation, vol. 274, no. 1, (January 7/14), pp. 18-22.

Wolcott, James. (2001) Terror on the Dotted Line. Vanity Fair, January, pp. 50-55.

About Peter McLaren

Professor McLaren began his teaching career in his hometown of Toronto, Canada, teaching in an inner-city school in one of the most highly populated housing projects in the country. McLaren completed his Ph.D at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, in 1983. In 1984 he held the position of Special Lecturer in Education at Brock University's College of Education where he taught in the undergraduate and graduate programs. In 1985 McLaren worked with Henry Giroux to create the Center for Education and Cultural Studies, at Miami University of Ohio, where he served as both Associate Director and Director. While at Miami he was awarded the title of Renowned Scholar in Residence, School of Education and Allied Professions. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Commerce, and Associate of Massey College, Professor McLaren is the author and editor of over 35 books. He began teaching at the University of California in 1993, where he serves as Professor, Division of Urban Schooling, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Professor McLaren lectures worldwide and his work has been translated into 15 languages. His most recent books include Schooling as a Ritual Performance, 3rd edition, Rowman and Littlefield, 2000, Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture, Routledge, 1995, Revolutionary Multiculturalism, Westview, 1997, and Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution, 2000.