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The most publicized of the synergy-censorship cases occurred in September 1998 when ABC News killed a Disney-related story prepared by its award-winning investigative team of correspondent Brian Ross and producer Rhonda Schwartz. The story began as a broad investigation of allegations of lax security at theme parks and resorts, leading to the inadvertent hiring of sex offenders, including pedophiles, as park employees.
Because Disney was to be only one of several park owners under the microscope, Ross and Schwartz got the go-ahead on the story. After all, it wasn’t the first time the team had faced the prospect of reporting on their parent company. In March 1998, ABC newsmagazine 20/20 had aired their story about widespread sweatshop labor in the U.S. territory of Saipan. Though it focused its criticism on Ralph Lauren and the Gap, the story did mention in passing that Disney was among the other American companies contracting to the offending factories.
But reporting has a life of its own and as Ross and Schwartz progressed on the theme-park investigation, they found that Disney wasn’t on the periphery, but was at the center of this story. When they handed in two drafts of what had turned into a sex-and-scandal exposé of Disney World, David Westin, president of ABC News, rejected the drafts. “They didn’t work,” said network spokeswoman Eileen Murphy.8 Even though Disney denies the allegations of lax security, first made in the book Disney: The Mouse Betrayed, and even though CEO Michael Eisner is on record saying “I would prefer ABC not cover Disney,”9 ABC denies the story was killed because of pressure from its parent company. Murphy did say, however, that “we would generally not embark on an investigation that focused solely on Disney, for a whole variety of reasons, one of which is that whatever you come up with, positive or negative, will seem suspect.”10
The most vocal criticism of the affair came from Brill’s Content, the media-watch magazine founded in 1998 by Steven Brill. The publication lambasted ABC executives and journalists for their silence in the face of censorship, accusing them of caving in to their own internalized “Mouse-Ke-Fear.” In his previous incarnation as founder of the Court TV cable network and American Lawyer magazine, Steven Brill had some firsthand experience with censorship in synergy. After selling his miniature media empire to Time Warner in 1997, Brill claims that he faced pressure on several different stories that brushed up against the octopus-like tentacles of the Time Warner/ Turner media empire. In a memo excerpted in Vanity Fair, Brill writes that company lawyers tried to suppress a report in American Lawyer about a Church of Scientology lawsuit against Time magazine (owned by Time Warner) and asked Court TV to refrain from covering a trial involving Warner Music. He also claims to have received a request from Time Warner’s chief financial officer, Richard Bressler, to “kill a story” about William Baer, the director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition —ironically, the very body charged with reviewing the Time Warner-Turner merger for any violation of anti-trust law.11
Despite the alleged meddling, all the stories in question made it to print or to air, but Brill’s experience still casts a shadow over the future of press freedom inside the merged giants. Individual crusading editors and producers have always carried the flag for journalists’ right to do their job, but in the present climate, for every crusader there will be many more walking on eggs for fear of losing their job. And it’s not surprising that some have begun to see trouble everywhere, second-guessing the wishes of top executives in ways more creative and paranoid than the executives may even dare to imagine themselves. This is the truly insidious nature of self-censorship: it does the gag work more efficiently than an army of bullying and meddling media moguls could ever hope to accomplish.
China Chill
As we have seen in recent years, journalists, producers and editors are not only finding reason to walk carefully when dealing with judicial and regulatory bodies (not to mention theme parks), but —in the case of China —we have watched an entire country become a tiptoe zone. A wave of China-chill incidents has swept through the Western media and entertainment industries since Deng Xiaoping tentatively lifted the Communist Party monopoly on news and began slowly to open his country’s borders to some censor-approved foreign media and entertainment.
Now the global culture industry faces the possibility that it is the West that may have to play by China’s rules —outside as well as inside its borders. Those rules were neatly summed up in a 1992 article in The South China Morning Post: “Provided they do not break the law or go against party line, journalists and cultural personnel are guaranteed freedom from interference by commissars and censors.”12 And with 100 million cable subscribers expected in China by the year 2000, several cultural empire builders have already begun exercising their freedom to agree with the Chinese government.
An early incident involved Rupert Murdoch’s notorious decision to drop the BBC’s World Service news from the Asian version of Star TV. Chinese authorities had objected to a BBC broadcast on Mao Tse-tung, sending a clear warning about the types of reporting that will be welcome and profitable in China’s wired world. More recently, HarperCollins Publishers (this book’s publisher in the United Kingdom), also owned by Murdoch’s News Corp, decided to drop East and West: China, Power, and the Future of Asia, written by Hong Kong’s last British governor, Chris Patten. At issue was the possibility that the views expressed by Patten —who had called for more democracy in Hong Kong and criticized human-rights abuses in China —would enrage the Chinese government upon which Murdoch’s satellite ventures are dependent. In the storm of controversy that followed, more allegations of censorship for the sake of global synergy came out of the woodwork, including one by Jonathan Mirsky, former East Asia editor for the Murdoch-owned London Times. He claimed that the paper “has simply decided, because of Murdoch’s interests, not to cover China in a serious way.”13
Fears of retaliation from the Chinese are not without basis. Famous for punishing media organizations that don’t toe the government line and rewarding those that do, the Chinese government banned the sale and ownership of private satellite dishes in October 1993: the dishes were picking up more than ten foreign stations, including CNN, BBC and MTV. Liu Xilian, vice minister for radio, film and television, would only say, “Some of the satellite programs are suitable and some are not suitable for the normal public.”14 The Chinese government fired another salvo in December 1996 after learning of Disney’s plans to release Kundun, a Martin Scorsese film about Tibet’s Dalai Lama. “We are resolutely opposed to the making of this movie. It is intended to glorify the Dalai Lama, so it is an interference in China’s internal affairs,” stated Kong Min, an official at the Ministry of Radio, Film and Television.15 When the studio went ahead with the film anyway, Beijing instituted a ban on the release of all Disney films in China, a ban that stayed in place for two years.
The medium will change from a mass-produced and mass-consumed commodity to an endless feast of niches and specialties…. A new age of individualism is coming and it will bring an eruption of culture unprecedented in human history.
—George Gilder, Life After Television, 1990
Since China only lets in ten foreign films a year and puts controls on their distribution, the Kundun incident sent a chill through the film industry, which had several other China-related projects in the works, including MGM’s Red Corner and Sony’s Seven Years in Tibet. To their credit, none of the studios pulled the plug on these films in progress, and in fact many in the film community rallied around Scorsese and Kundun. However, both MGM and Sony made official statements that attempted to depoliticize their China films, even if it meant contradicting their lead actors and directors. MGM went ahead with Red Corner, a movie about China’s corrupt criminal justice system, starring Richard Gere, but while Gere maintained that the film is “a different angle of dealing with Tibet,”16 MGM’s worldwide marketing president, Gerry Rich, told a different story: “We’re not pursuing a political agenda. We’re in the business of selling entertainment.” Seven Years in Tibet g
ot a similar sell from Sony: “You don’t want to convey that it’s a movie about a political cause,” a studio executive said.17 Disney, meanwhile, finally managed to get the Chinese government to lift the ban on its films with the release of Mulan, a feel-good animated tale based on a 1,300-year-old legend from the Sui Dynasty. The South China Morning Post described the depiction of Chinese heroism and patriotism as an “olive branch” and “the most China-friendly movie Holly wood has made in years.” It also served its purpose: Mulan flopped at the box office but it opened the door to discussions between Disney and Beijing for a planned $2 billion Disney theme park in Hong Kong.
If anything, the Western lust for access to the Chinese entertainment market has only become more intense in recent years, despite worsening relationships between the U.S. and Chinese governments over such issues as access to China’s securities and telecommunications industries, more revelations of espionage and, most disastrous of all, the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war. The reason, in part, is that in the past, the desire to enter China was based on projected earnings, but in 1998, those projections became a reality. James Cameron’s Titanic broke all the records for foreign releases and earned $40 million at the box office in China, even in the midst of an economic downturn.
China chill is significant above all in what it tells us about the priorities and power wielded today by the multinationals. Financial self-interest in business is nothing new, nor is it in itself destructive. What is new is the reach and scope of these megacorporations’ financial self-interest, and the potential global consequences, in both international and local terms. These consequences will be felt not in boisterous celebrity standoffs between such players as Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner, Martin Scorsese and Chris Patten, all of whom have the resources and clout to advance their positions regardless of minor setbacks. Disney and News Corp are moving swiftly ahead in China, yet Tibet remains a cause célèbre among movie stars and musicians, while Patten’s book, after quickly finding another publisher, certainly sold more copies as a result of the controversy. Rather, the lasting effects, once again, will be in the self-censorship that the media conglomerates are now in a position to seed down through the ranks of their organizations. If news reporters, editors and producers have to take into account their moguls’ expansionist agendas when reporting on foreign affairs, why stop at China? Wouldn’t coverage of the Indonesian government’s genocide in East Timor raise concerns for any multinational doing, or hoping to do, business in populous Indonesia? What if a conglomerate has deals in the works in Nigeria, Colombia or Sudan? This is a long way from the rhetoric following the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the media moguls claimed that their cultural products would carry the torch of freedom to authoritarian regimes. Not only does that mission appear to have been swiftly abandoned in favor of economic self-interest, but it seems that it may be the torch of authoritarianism that is being carried by those most determined to go global.
Copyright Bullies
After NATO’s 1999 air strikes provoked Serbian “rock rallies” where teens in Chicago Bulls caps defiantly burned the American flag, few would be naive enough to reassert the tired old refrain that MTV and McDonald’s are bringing peace and democracy to the world. What was crystallized in those moments when pop culture bridged the wartime divide, however, was that even if there exists no other cultural, political or linguistic common ground, Western media have made good on the promise of introducing the first truly global lexicon of imagery, music and icons. If we agree on nothing else, virtually everyone knows that Michael Jordan is the best basketball player that ever lived.
That may seem a minor achievement compared with the grand “global village” pronouncements made after the collapse of Communism, but it is an accomplishment sufficiently vast to have revolutionized both the making of art and the practicing of politics. Verbal or visual references to sitcoms, movie characters, advertising slogans and corporate logos have become the most effective tool we have to communicate across cultures —an easy and instant “click.” The depth of this form of social branding came into sharp focus in March 1999 when a scandal erupted over a popular textbook used in American public schools. The Grade 6 math text was riddled with mentions and photographs of well-known brand-name products: Nike shoes, McDonald’s, Gatorade. In one instance, a word problem taught students to calculate diameters by measuring an Oreo cookie. Predictably, parents’ groups were furious over this milestone in the commercialization of education; here was a textbook, it seemed, with paid advertorial. But McGraw-Hill, the book’s publisher, insisted that the critics had it all wrong. “You’re trying to get into what people are familiar with, so they can see, hey, mathematics is in the world out there,” Patricia S. Wilson, one of the book’s authors, explained. The brand-name references weren’t paid advertisements, she said, but an attempt to speak to students with their own references and in their own language —to speak to them, in other words, in brands.18
Nobody is more acutely aware of how enmeshed language and brands have become than the brand managers themselves. Cutting-edge trends in marketing theory encourage companies not to think of their brands as a series of attributes but to look at the psychosocial role they play in pop culture and in consumers’ lives. Cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken teaches corporations that to understand their own brands they have to set them free. Products like Kraft Dinner, McCracken argues, take on a life of their own when they leave the store —they become pop-culture icons, vehicles for family bonding, and creatively consumed expressions of individuality.19 The most recent chapter in this school of brand theory comes from Harvard professor Susan Fournier, whose paper, “The Consumer and the Brand: An Under standing within the Framework of Personal Relationships,” encourages marketers to use a human-relationship model in conceptualizing the brand’s place in society: is it a wife through an arranged marriage? A best friend or a mistress? Do customers “cheat” on their brand or are they loyal? Is the relationship a “casual friendship” or a “master/slave engagement”? As Fournier writes, “this connection is driven not by the image the brand ‘contains’ in the culture, but by the deep and significant psychological and socio-cultural meanings the consumer bestows on the brand in the process of meaning creation.”20
So here we are, for better or for worse, having meaningful committed relationships with our toothpaste and co-dependencies on our conditioner. We have almost two centuries’ worth of brand-name history under our collective belt, coalescing to create a sort of global pop-cultural Morse code. But there is just one catch: while we may all have the code implanted in our brains, we’re not really allowed to use it. In the name of protecting the brand from dilution, artists and activists who try to engage with the brand as equal partners in their “relationships” are routinely dragged into court for violating trademark, copyright, libel or “brand disparagement” laws — easily abused statutes that form an airtight protective seal around the brand, allowing it to brand us, but prohibiting us from so much as scuffing it.
Much of this comes back to synergy. The definition of trademark in U.S. law is “any word, name, symbol, or device, or combination thereof, used … to identify and distinguish goods from those manufactured or sold by others.” Many alleged violators of copyright are not trying to sell a comparable good or pass themselves off as the real thing. As branding becomes more expansionist, however, a competitor is anyone doing anything remotely related, because anything remotely related has the potential to be a spin-off at some point in the synergistic future.
And so, when we try to communicate with each other by using the language of brands and logos, we run the very real risk of getting sued. In the U.S., copyright and trademark laws —strengthened by Ronald Reagan in the same piece of 1983 legislation that loosened anti-trust law — are being invoked in ways that have far more to do with brand control than market competition. Of course there are many uses of these laws that are absolutely crucial if artists are to
have a hope of making a living, particularly with the growing ease of digital and electronic distribution. Artists need to be protected from outright thievery of their work by competitors and from its use for commercial profit without permission. I do know a few anti-copyright radicals who walk around in “All Copyright Is Theft” and “Information Wants to Be Free” T-shirts, though it seems to me that those positions are more provocative than practical. But what they do serve to highlight, if only rhetorically, is the climate of cultural and linguistic privatization being advanced through outright copyright and trademark harassment.
Copyright and trademark harassment is a massive and growing industry, and though its effects are too sweeping to fully document, here are a few random examples. Dairy Queen bakers won’t squirt Bart Simpson onto frozen birthday cakes for fear of a lawsuit from Fox; in 1991, Disney forced a group of New Zealand parents in a remote country town to remove their amateur renditions of Pluto and Donald Duck from a playground mural; and Barney has been breaking up children’s birthday parties across the U.S., claiming that any parent caught dressed in a purple dinosaur suit is violating its trademark. The Lyons Group, which owns the Barney character, “has sent 1,000 letters to shop owners” renting or selling the offending costumes. “They can have a dinosaur costume. It’s when it’s a purple dinosaur that it’s illegal, and it doesn’t matter what shade of purple, either,” says Susan Elsner Furman, Lyons’ spokesperson.21