There’s more, too, says the Special Agent, who has now abandoned his rubber ring to float lazily in the middle of the pool flicking dead leaves around with his hands.
‘I mean,’ he says, ‘the traditional way of opposing policies or systems you don’t agree with – you know, lines of Socialist Workers selling their papers on the streets . . . it’s just a joke. Your average person will look at it and think it’s a complete waste of paper. Whereas, for instance, a well done billboard – your average person is going to have much more chance to look at it, really get involved in it, understand – and get a kick out of it, and begin to think about it. The value of questioning authority should not be overstated, and culture jamming is one of the best ways to get those questions across in a way that people can appreciate.’
‘I think that to a large degree the battle for the future is for people’s hearts and minds,’ continues Apple. ‘It’s not about armed struggle or even traditional types of mass resistance right now – there’s none of that kind of thing in the Western world at the moment. It brings on such a wave of repression from the state and often a wave of revulsion from the populace – culture jamming has the opposite effect; of inspiring people. And because of the guerrilla tactics, you can’t really stop it in the way you can stop more traditional forms of resistance. It’s a lot more decentralised.’ He bobs to the side of the pool.
‘I guess I should think about getting out. Are you going on this hike? They’re going to climb a mountain. I can’t decide whether to go.’ He looks like he should get out, but really has no inclination to at all. It’s a damn fine morning.
‘You know,’ he says, philosophically, ‘there’s just something incredibly powerful about laughing. I think Beaumarchais wrote that sometimes a man must laugh, lest he cry. If you can’t use humour, then you’re bound to fail. And you probably deserve to.’
I am in a motel room in Colorado, and I am exhausted. It is late evening, and America is bigger than I thought it would be. For some reason, I imagined that a jaunt from California to Arizona to Colorado would be in the same league as a trip from London to Bristol. I was very wrong, and now I am knackered, lying on my bed with a grim takeaway pizza trying to find something on one of the sixty channels of my TV set that I can watch without being overcome by a faint feeling of nausea. Eventually, I strike gold: The Simpsons! This is just what I need. It will ease my tired brain, take my mind off how greasy my pizza is and prevent me from taking anything too seriously. I settle down to watch. This is what I get:
The Simpsons title sequence.
Immediate ad break: skin cream, doughnuts, parcel service, mobile phones.
Start of cartoon: 6 minutes.
More ads: mobile phones (‘free up your wireless life’), Taco Bell, triple mascara, chewing gum, local radio, medical insurance.
Cartoon continues: biting satirical critique of American gun culture (7 minutes).
More ads: evening news (‘Is Bin Laden dead? A special report!’), cheeseburgers, steakhouse, grillhouse, Jeep Liberty, Coca-Cola, baseball game, new hit series.
Cartoon continues and ends: 7 minutes.
More ads: blockbuster movie with Kiefer Sutherland, local phone company.
The Simpsons closing credits.
This is my first time in the USA. I am evidently a bit naïve. I have never seen anything like this. I am depressed. I give up on my pizza and go to bed.
The next morning I wake up under a beautiful midwestern sky and open my quilted curtains to see the warm, brown foothills of the Rocky Mountains rising above me in welcome. Still dazed from my journey (a train from San Francisco this time), and my first experience of US television, I go for an hour-long walk to the top of the nearest hill before breakfast and come back feeling a lot more human. I am in Boulder, Colorado and, aptly, I have come, among other things, to talk to a man who is keen to explain that advertising and branding are far from the only means by which consumer society instils its ideology into the consciousness of its citizens.
In fact, say many activists, in the US and elsewhere, advertising culture is not even the most insidious means of communicating the consumer message. At least you know where you are with advertising; know it’s paid for, know it’s trying to condition you, to persuade you, trying to prise open your wallet. On the other side of the fence, though, sits the news media that is such a proudly trumpeted feature of democracies the world over; a feature, say many, that is part of the problem, not the solution.
In the US, the mainstream media is accused by activists of reflecting and promoting the self-obsessed, throwaway society – mediating the world in the image of free market globalisation. They have an unavoidable point. The American media – particularly the airwaves – are among the most nakedly commercial in the world, with a panoply of commercial TV channels, radio stations and publications whose reason for existence is to ‘deliver audiences’ to their advertisers. Virtually all of the country’s TV and radio stations, newspapers and magazines are reliant on the ad-space buying power of corporations. This leads, inevitably, to those corporations having both direct and indirect influence over what is published or broadcast.
At the most obvious level, corporations are always keen to ensure that their adverts are not featured within or next to ‘inappropriate’ features. ‘The Coca-Cola Company,’ wrote Coke’s advertising agency in a memo to magazines, ‘requires that all insertions are placed adjacent to editorial that is consistent with each brand’s marketing strategy . . . We consider the following subjects to be inappropriate: hard news, sex, diet, political issues, environmental issues . . .’21 Such corporate diktats are far from exceptional. Adbusters provided another striking example a few years ago when it revealed some of the responses it got from US TV networks to attempts to buy space for its ‘uncommercial’ for Buy Nothing Day. Despite the high production values of the commercial, and the fact that the money was on the table, not one channel would air it. Given reasons ranged from NBC’s ‘we don’t want to take any advertising that’s inimical to our legitimate business interests’ to CBS’s starkly Stalinist ‘this commercial . . . is in opposition to the current economic policy in the United States’.22
Then there is ownership. The vast majority of TV and radio stations, magazines, book publishers, film producers, record producers and even theme parks are owned by just ten multinational ‘entertainment’ corporations – AOL Time Warner, AT&T, General Electric, News Corporation, Viacom (which owns the publisher of this book), Bertelsmann, Disney, Vivendi, Liberty and Sony. Lest any non-Americans start to feel smug, six of the above companies control vast chunks of the media in the rest of the world, too, and the chunks are shifting in size and shape so fast that if I were to quote a figure now, it would be out of date by the time you read it.
The outcome of allowing key sources of a nation’s information, news and cultural expression to be controlled by an ever-narrowing cabal of giant profit-making entertainment corporations can be seen anytime a television set is switched on in America. The attitude of Disney’s Chief Executive, Michael Eisner, sums up the issue as well as any activist could when he explains his company’s mission: ‘We have no obligation to make history, we have no obligation to make art, we have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.’23
This situation has arisen as a direct result of a progressive demolition of regulations designed to protect public service media from the cultural fires of the market. Since the 1980s, regulations which prevent cross-media ownership, stop particular companies dominating the market and ensure the continued existence of local and community-based media have been progressively rolled back, partly as a response to aggressive lobbying from the media giants. Since George W. Bush’s Republican elite took power in 2000 and consolidated it in 2002, the pace has been accelerated.
The Federal Communications Commission, the body charged with overseeing media regulation, has been placed in the hands of the free market ideologue Michael Powell (son of Secret
ary of State Colin) – a man who, when asked the definition of ‘public interest’ replied, ‘I have no idea.’24 Powell has placed a swathe of regulations ‘under review’, including laws designed to prevent single corporations owning large numbers of radio stations, controlling TV and newspapers in the same area of the country and guaranteeing ‘independent voices’ in local TV. In February 2002, the FCC overturned two significant regulations: a sixty-year-old rule that prevented any TV company reaching more than 35 per cent of the national audience, and a rule preventing a company from owning a cable channel and a broadcast station in the same city. There are more such ‘market openings’ on the books.
This phenomenon is looking likely to be repeated worldwide as globalisation provides new ‘market opportunities’ in the unfortunate, benighted nations of what one media consultant has called the ‘underscreened, undermalled, still-waiting-for-cable world’.25 AOL Time Warner’s former head Gerry Levin publicly declared his ambition to ‘have corporations redefined as instruments of public service’26 in a forthcoming WTO agreement – the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which media companies are working hard to influence. GATS, they hope, will outlaw or weaken national and regional regulations protecting public service media and limiting corporate ownership. But whether they get it through the WTO or some other means, there is no doubt what the global media empire-builders want: the kind of control over information and entertainment that they have in the USA, writ global.
The chances of the media being ‘free’ under such circumstances seem pretty slim. This is precisely why a growing number of people within the movement see the mainstream media as a threat, rather than a potential ally. David Barsamian is one of them, and as I sit talking to him in a noisy coffee shop in Boulder, I see what links the arguments of the culture jammers to the work of people like him. I see that this is about a battle for information: a battle for the right to tell the stories that shape your society.
Barsamian is founder and director of Alternative Radio, a station he set up, with virtually no experience, as an experiment in 1986, and which now has its programmes featured on 125 stations internationally, reaching millions of people. Increasingly one of America’s most respected, and most uncompromising, media critics, Barsamian is intense, smart and fast-talking, with a sharpshooting grin, wide glasses and a mop of greying hair.
I have already been down to Alternative Radio’s less than palatial (and all the nicer for it) office which, as Barsamian puts it, is ‘situated to correspond with its position in the mainstream mass media: down an alley, behind a house, on top of a garage’, and have been loaded up with gratis tapes of recent programmes. They include ‘Michael Parenti: The Manufacture of History’, ‘Robert McChesney: Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy’, ‘Eqbal Ahmad: Terrorism – Theirs and Ours’, and ‘Arundhati Roy: A Writer’s Place in Politics’. Alternative Radio would not describe itself as easy listening.
‘Look at the big picture,’ Barsamian instructs me. ‘Look at what has happened to American journalism. Ben Bagdikian’s classic book The Media Monopoly has always been the primer for what is happening to our media. It came out in 1983, and in it he identified fifty corporations that controlled most of the media in the United States. Second edition came out – twenty-eight. Third edition – twenty-three. Fourth edition – fourteen. Fifth edition – ten. The latest edition, which came out in 2000, identified six corporations. And these corporations are now subsumed in even bigger corporations. CNN and ABC are controlled by Disney. NBC is controlled by General Electric. These are no longer news-gathering organisations in control of their own destiny. They’re controlled by entertainment companies interested in maximising profits.’ He sighs, but quickly. Barsamian does everything quickly. He has to be in seventeen other places today, most of them at once; he’s that sort of person.
‘This concentration of monopoly control of information poses a serious threat to democracy,’ he goes on. ‘It’s not just people who would call themselves left-wing or progressive who should be concerned about this. People like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison – conservative theorists – said that the citizenry need a broad range of opinions in order to make their own decisions on the important issues of the day. Opinion should range from A to Z. Today, the range of opinions in the United States is from A to B. American democracy has significantly suffered because we don’t have a lively media.’
Barsamian, like others, says that the media, as a result of corporate ownership, profit-seeking and deregulation, is more interested in producing entertainment than information, education – or news. This, he says, is no surprise – it’s the inevitable result of turning your information-producing power over to a handful of competitive, profit-making private companies.
‘Corporate control drives the media here not to generate coverage but to generate profits,’ he says. ‘Investigative reporting is virtually eliminated – there’s still a bit left in print journalism, but in electronic journalism it’s been virtually eliminated. In-depth stories take money and they take time. The corporate concentration of the media really constricts the scope for news reporting, news gathering and the kind of background that is required to understand something. So instead of explanation on, say, Afghanistan, we get good versus evil, liberty versus hate, black versus white. Which side are you on? Are you with us or with the terrorists? Good news reporting is about explaining the grey areas. Corporate control of information is structurally unable to get into those grey areas – it’s too expensive, it takes too much time, it doesn’t deliver the profits in the same way.’ He stirs his tall latte, frantically.
‘People aren’t stupid,’ he says insistently, as if someone had suddenly appeared from under the table and challenged him to prove otherwise. ‘Stupidity is constructed. There’s a lot of propaganda about the American people being apathetic – they just want to watch football and drink beer. That’s not because there’s some genetic basis for it, it’s constructed. It’s constructed by a media and educational system that says: your role as a citizen finds its ultimate fulfilment as a consumer. Not as someone who is involved in important decisions about where money is spent, how US foreign policy decisions are made – any of those things. You’re supposed to focus on why the Denver Broncos may not have a good team this year because the coach has made bad decisions about the running backs. On issues like that, you can debate, you can be very vitriolic . . . but on important areas of foreign policy, life-and-death national decisions, whether we should bomb Afghanistan – you’re supposed to roll out the flag, wrap yourself in it, say, “I am a loyal American, I will follow my leader.”’
If this is the case, I say, what can be done to tackle the media’s control of information, and the values it promotes?
‘Well,’ he says, without pausing to think, ‘the problem is that the media in general, especially the electronic media, won’t give the necessary explication needed to deconstruct events for the listener. It’s all soundbites, eyebites, you know. What tends to happen in those circumstances is the mouthing of slogans, things that everyone believes in – that the United States defends freedom, that the US is the beacon of democracy, as George Bush puts it – you don’t need to produce any evidence because you’re supporting conventional wisdom. Whereas if you say, rightly, that the United States has been, for a long time, a major supporter of international terrorism, then the reaction is – “what?” You need time to explain that, to expand on it, you can’t just produce the usual media soundbites. People demand answers, you have to explain the CIA training terrorist gangs in Central America, the financing of the Mujahideen . . . You need to provide facts when you’re challenging conventional wisdom in a way that you don’t if you’re shoring it up. It means that real journalism – challenging journalism – needs more time, and needs to be allowed to explore the issues in a way which modern news simply does not allow. What does that mean should be done? It means breaking up the corporate concentration of media ownership for a start, ra
ther than encouraging it. It means getting the Federal Communications Commission, which is supposed to defend the public interest, to stop defending the business interests of Wall Street and Madison Avenue. But it also means that those of us who like to complain about it should get going on our own media. The potential to do that, and the ease of doing it, exists as never before.’ He’s finished his coffee now. He fiddles with the spoon anyway.
‘The corporate concentration of media ownership is a dagger at the throat of democracy,’ he says. ‘That’s what this is. A dagger.’
Barsamian probably feels like a lone voice on this subject sometimes. He isn’t, though; questioning the ideology and the work of the mass media, and attempting, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so, to provide alternatives to it is a preoccupation of activists worldwide. A movement that wants to get across ideas that few have even considered – ideas that challenge authority not just physically or politically but philosophically, ideas about values – is unlikely to get a fair hearing in the mainstream media, and rarely does.
One obvious but telling example. When I looked through the newspapers and watched the TV news reports after the Genoa protests, I heard and saw virtually nothing about the debates that had gone on for a week before the protests. For a week we had gathered in a complex of tents on the seashore and discussed the problems with, and solutions to, everything from currency speculation to corporate regulation, changes in agricultural policy to land reform. Organisations from all over the world had met and made links and engaged in intelligent debate about the state of the world. And all we saw in the press was bricks, tear-gas, bullets and broken windows.
One No, Many Yeses Page 16
