Pepsi Cola Presents a Frito-Lay Production of the Microsoft News, Sponsored by Mastercard

Nicholas Long
nl198296@yahoo.com

I was astonished when I read the quote from Josh Schroeter, printed in the article "Wooly Times on the Web" by Robin Goldwyn Blumenthal, where he says that the media in the digital age will be "a marketing vehicle with the editorial content inserted into that." I was not astonished that someone could suggest that the media fall sway to advertisers and big business; I was astonished that anyone still believed that this has not been the situation for the last century (for a radical, left-wing perspective on corporate control of media, check out "Our Un-Free Press" by McChesney and Scott. I found it online, mint condition, for three bucks--I guess their perspective is not very popular in the United States of Disney).


Corporate interests have applied a free-market ideology to the media with disastrous consequences, mainly because these corporations have done everything they can to remove the one aspect of capitalism they enjoy the least--competition. They want, as Ben Bagdikian puts it, a "media monopoly," so corporations buy up ABC and CBS, but they also buy as many different media outlets as they can, such as book publishers, magazines, newspapers, recording companies, movie studios, web portals, etc. That way you can watch a piece of fluff morning news show on ABC, and their guests will be authors with books coming out from a Disney-owned publisher, or actors in a Disney-owned film, or singers on Disney-owned labels, and so on until you can no longer hold back the vomit.


Click here to see what Jay Leno will do to suck up every advertising dollar that he can.


The result of such conglomeration is media that is largely homogenous from medium to medium. Alternative voices, voices of dissent, are not heard because they do not have the resources to reach a wide audience (Robert McChesney, in his article "U.S. Media at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century," points out that most "indie" movie studios are actually subsidiaries of major film studios to give the illusion the independent studios can "challenge the existing giants"--they can't).



I'm not at all surprised by the "Taking Care of Business" article by Sharyn Vane where the wall between advertising and editorial is rapidly eroding. The fact that one Atlanta Journal-Constitution is the "director of innovations" and is in charge of coordinating the newsroom and the advertising section of the paper is enough to make me laugh and cry.


Check out the advertising campaign to sell advertising.