Senator Bernie Sanders’ book, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In [1] includes a chapter titled, Corporate Media and the Threat to Our Democracy. I summarized its information on the six huge media corporations that control 90% of what we see, hear, and read in my previous post.
Senator Sanders experienced firsthand the control and power the six huge media corporations have when he ran for President. Certainly initially, and probably throughout the whole campaign, his candidacy received less coverage than other candidates. Perhaps this was because many of the issues he raised and discussed were ones that made corporate executives uncomfortable. Senator Sanders summarized his experience as follows: “as a general rule of thumb, the more important an issue is to large numbers of working people, the less interesting it is to the corporate media. … Further, issues being pushed by the top 1 percent get a lot of attention.” (page 421)
As an example, Sanders cites the coverage of the assertion that Social Security’s benefits needed to be cut because, supposedly, money to pay them would soon run out. The financial challenges facing Social Security were exaggerated and solutions other than cutting benefits were largely ignored by the corporate media. Sanders and others organized a broad coalition in opposition to Social Security cuts that included AARP and virtually every other seniors’ organization in the country, the American Legion and every major veterans’ group, the AFL-CIO representing 13 million workers, the largest organizations in the country representing people with disabilities, the National Organization of Women (NOW), and others.
A press conference opposing cuts to Social Security benefits was held by this broad coalition, which represented tens of millions of Americans, along with U.S. Senators and Representatives. It received almost no coverage from the corporate media. Similarly, throughout the presidential campaign, many issues that Sanders raised got little to no coverage from the big media corporations, including economic inequality, poverty, Native American issues, the housing crisis, climate change, fracking, and a single-payer health care system. On the other hand, the topics of how much money each candidate had raised, when Sanders was going to formally announce his candidacy, and when he was going to drop out and endorse Clinton received lots of attention from the corporate media.
The corporate media view politics and elections as entertainment and a way to capture attention (and therefore revenue). They do not take responsibility for helping to build an informed American electorate. They are large corporations whose goal is to make as much money as they can for their shareholders and executives.
These media corporations rely on billions of dollars in advertising from the pharmaceutical, auto, financial, health insurance, and fossil fuel industries (among others). This advertising revenue presents conflicts of interest for the media corporations’ executives’ decisions on the reporting of news. Viewers and readers would be naïve to think that news coverage – or lack of coverage – is not influenced by the interests of large advertisers.
The media corporations have a perspective on what is important and worthy of coverage, and what is not. Few of the journalists who work for them cross the boundaries of the corporate perspective. As Senator Sanders writes:
“Over the course of my political life [roughly 45 years] I cannot recall a mainstream journalist coming up to me and asking what I was going to do to end the scourge of poverty in this country, or how I was going to combat the disgraceful level of income and wealth inequality, or what role I would play in ending the influence of big money in politics. Those, and many similar issues, are just not what the corporate media considers important. And my strong guess is that if by mistake, or in some state of confusion, a reporter for the corporate media started asking those types of questions, he or she would not last long with the company.” (page 436)
Concentrated, corporate ownership of the media limits the points of view and the information Americans receive. It limits cross-cultural and cross-class awareness and knowledge. It tends to break us into factions rather than building community in our diverse country. This is not good for democracy.
Furthermore, mergers are in various stages of consideration that could reduce the six corporate media giants to only three. Therefore, media concentration is likely to increase further in the near future, unless we and regulatory government agencies take a stand against it.
Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has eliminated net neutrality, which gives more market place power to the big media corporations through their control of Internet access.
I encourage you to take action to stop mergers among the giant media corporations and to work to ensure net neutrality. If you want more information about these issues, including how you can take action on them, go to freepress.net. There, you can join with hundreds of thousands of other engaged Americans to fight to save the free and open internet, curb runaway media consolidation, protect press freedom, and ensure diverse voices are represented in our media.
You can also review my earlier post, Our failing mainstream media, that encourages the support of not-for-profit, public or consumer-funded media as a better model for a democracy than the current giant, for-profit, advertising-funded corporations. It identifies six broadcast, on-line, and print media outlets you can patronize and support as good sources of information and good alternatives to the corporate media.
[1] Sanders, B., 2016, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In. St. Martin’s Press, NY, NY.
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