20 YEARS OF GLOBALVISION

The media is our mission: critiquing it as we do, and then attempting with whatever resources we can muster to offer up models of the kind of programming we would like to see more of.
We don’t see it as an alternative but actually as models of the possible, other ways of covering news and seeing the world. My partner Rory O Connor and I worked at big networks. We know how to do that. We have chosen to do this.

If there is one argument that we have made over these past twenty years, it is that the media itself must become an issue, and a battleground. Happily there is one now but it seems more concerned with policy than practices, with challenging the FCC then changing media content.

This is the first issue that I turned to in the introduction of my first and arguably my best book The More You Watch The Less You Know. Bob McChesney and singer Jackson Browne wrote prefaces. I was disappointed when my namesake, the publisher at Seven Stories Press, would not reissue it or promote on its tenth anniversary because it is hardly dated. There are so many people out there now that resonate to the story I tell.

The fault I see now: I may have underestimated how bad the media culture was and is, and what has to be done to change it. My film WMD and books on the media “coverage” of the Iraq War fill that in. What do you think as you we go back a decade and think about whats’s changed and what hasn’t.

Your input welcome. Dissector@mediachannel.org

Here’s part of the introduction to that book to show what I was thinking ten years ago in l997 when it was first published. (A revised paperback came out two years later.) It called for a Mediachannel. We built it and it is still here for now.

Opening salvo

We are living at the end of the first Media Century, an era in which the press, radio and television, and now computers, literally revolutionized our lives. In developed countries at least, but also in every capital of the world, few can imagine life without access to telephones, radio, television, beepers and cellphones, and for a growing number of the cyber savvy, the Internet and computer-based interactivity.
The effect of these new media is total on social relations, on political culture and discourse, but also on entertainment and economics. Many of its implications are troubling for the intellectual, socio-cultural and economic life of our country and others, most profoundly for the future of democracy. The determinative role of modern commercial media is rarely examined by a media which has no interest in having attention focused on its own role.
Usually media issues are downplayed in the business or feature pages of the newspaper. This book wants to move them up on to page one as a war story—the war story of our times.
The media war is an undeclared war, one that is chronicled in gossip columns but rarely examined in depth. Yes, the war’s battles are often reported—in a manner of speaking. If you want to find out which suit is now in charge or who’s bought what, you can. But more often than not, this saga is covered only as a chronicle of business decisions, with the cultural and political implications rarely spelled out or followed up. I draw on some of that reportage in these pages, not as a clip and paste job, but with the intent of fusing my own experiences, specialized information, and the insights of other insiders to delve into the larger meaning of the changes taking place at such breathtaking speed.
“This is a war on several fronts,” acknowledges England’s Guardian, “in which timidity won’t be the winner. The world’s telephone, wireless, and cable companies are battling it out to become the dominant conveyors of information, while media giants such as Disney, Viacom, Microsoft, and Rupert Murdoch’s empire are restructuring to become the dominant suppliers of entertainment and software.” To compete effectively, these companies have opted to become colossal conglomerates through mergers and acquisitions, aided and abetted by government policies. They have iin effecytt become cartels, operating globally with little regulation and even less social responsibility.
Truth is as much a casualty in this media war as in any other. Intentional or not, one effect of what is called the information age is the continuing underinforming of the larger public, while an elite sector is inundated with more news and information than it can possibly absorb.
And it is not just the media corporations that have merged; there has been a merging of business and journalistic values as well, such that the different companies have become practically indistinguishable from one other. As the companies grow, often by taking on vast loads of debt, the inevitable downsizing and scaling back of news divisions has contributed to this sameness.
This media war is being fought not with guns but with marketing strategies and corporate logos that value entertainment more than information, diversion more than democracy. No wonder that Larry Gelbart, the screenwriter who created M*A*S*H, reached for a military metaphor as the title of his 1997 TV drama skewering media moguls, calling it Weapons of Mass Distraction. Those weapons, he told Howard Rosenberg of the Los Angeles Times, “take our eye off the ball. We’re more concerned with who is sleeping with whom, and who is having a baby. The real problems in America and in the world go unnoticed while the prurient side of us is appealed to.”
Media executives speak in the language of war—of bombarding audiences, targeting markets, capturing grosses, killing the competition, and winning, by which they mean making more money than the other guy. Some news organizations even refer to their employees as the troops. This high-tech war deploys technologies whose goal, in part, is to expand, domestically and globally, an entertainment-information economy now valued, in the United States alone, at $150 billion a year. Already, well over 50 percent of the revenues for America’s cultural export industries are raised overseas. As the companies duel, countries and communities often find themselves in the crossfire.
Between April and October 1996 alone, by actual count, 56,949,501 commercials aired on American media nationwide. The TV industry made $34 billion in profits. One survey of local news shows found that 30 percent of their ads were for media and entertainment products. “Who knows better than the media that TV sells what it shows,” commented researcher Paul Klite, who also quotes editor Harold Evans about what that means for the future of news. “The challenge of the media,” Evans says, “is not to stay in business but to stay in journalism.”
Media companies make no secret of their international ambitions. In March 1996 the Wall Street Journal quoted HBO’s new CEO, Jeffrey Bewkes, as calling overseas expansion his company’s manifest destiny. Increasingly, the new class of media moguls has taken “We Are the World” as its own mantra.
Like all conflicts, the media war leaves a trail of victims and marginalized peoples. In the former Yugoslavia, it is widely recognized that propaganda posing as news, on both Serbian and Croatian television, fueled dormant hatreds and spurred on the right-wing nationalist movements that launched a genocidal conflict. Constantly replayed footage of World War II, in which both sides used the same footage to accuse each other of atrocities, brought on more atrocities. The nation went from watching war on TV to becoming caught up in a war that was shown on TV. It was a media war before it became a shooting war. The people were saturation bombed with hate messages and distorted news before the first shot was fired. (This happened on radio in Rwanda and Burundi as well, but has gone largely unreported.) At the end of 1996, when Serbian pro-democracy protesters took to the streets challenging the Milosovic regime, they spoke out continuously against the state-owned media, brandishing slogans like “Turn Off Your TV. Turn On Your Brain.”
In the West, there was a virtual media cleansing of the forces behind ethnic cleansing. It took years before the news networks shifted the way they framed the story of the former Yugoslavia from a case of ethnic and religious hatred in which all sides were equally to blame, to a story about premeditated Serbian nationalist aggression By then it was too late. The horrific images of the war had already overwhelmed interpretive coverage. I am convinced that because so few viewers understood the conflict, few spoke out, including antiwar activists. You can determine if I am on target by asking yourself (and your friends) if you know, after all those years of watching news from Bosnia, how the war started and who was behind it.
As globalization restructures the world economy and uses the media as its global marketing arm. there is less, not more, coverage of global trends. As global news becomes more important, it is covered less. There is half as much international coverage on the broadcast networks as there was ten years ago. Stephen Hess, author of International News and Foreign Correspondents, surveying 404 foreign correspondents, concludes that coverage has declined in newspapers too. Of the stories that remain,, violent images characterize half of the them, what is often called “bang bang” coverage. Why is there so much of it? Writer Neil Hickey in the Columbia Journalism Review recounts a conversation with one Gulf War journalist who spoke of getting a “rocket from New York”—a missive telling him what competing networks were airing—ordering him to file more on various firefights, regardless of their military significance. “New York wants John Wayne movies,” he said. “not talking heads.” Images, not explanation. News managers prfer action to information and emotrion to interpretation.
Two thirds of the largest 1900 newspapers have no foreign correspondents at all. Johanna Neuman of USA Today, in her book, Lights, Camera, War, quotes a comment from the London Spectator in 1889 on the impact of the telegraph: “The world is for purposes of intelligence reduced to a village. All men are to think of all things at the same time, on imperfect information and with too little interval for reflection.” Sound familiar?
Subcommandante Marcos, the charismatic Zapatista rebel leader, taped a message in the mountains of Mexico’s impoverished Chiapas region for screening at a January 1997 Freeing the Media teach-in in New York. No networks covered it. You will see why from the following excerpt: “The world of contemporary news is a world that exists for the VIPs—the very important people. Their everyday lives are what is important; if they get married, if they divorce, if they eat, what clothes they wear or what clothes they take off—these major movie stars and big politicians. But common people only appear for a moment—when they kill someone or when they die. For the communications giants, the others, the excluded, only exist when they are dead, when they are in jail or in court. This cannot go on.”
It will lead, Marcos warns, to more confrontation. “Sooner or later this virtual world clashes with the real world.” Significantly, Marcos and his guerrillas use modern media to transmit their messages, which tend to get stripped of their substance on image-driven TV programs, but do, nevertheless, find a supportive global audience via lengthy communiqués relayed over the Internet.
Yesterday, great empires colonized countries. Today, great companies colonize markets, which they call territories. Centuries ago, slave traders turned people into property, physically branding the bodies they claimed ownership over. Today, transnational corporations invest in intellectual property—what they call “content” and legally and artistically brand the programming they claim ownership over. Years ago, those brands were owner-specific, intended to last for a lifetime; today, copyrights and corporate logos are asserted in perpetuity and can impose a stranglehold over creators and the creative process.
Their contracts and legal boilerplate favors the interst of the media giants. Small companies and individual producers often have to “indemnify” them, and as a matter of course, surrender control over their work and any profits generated by it.
This media war has yet to produce an effective opposition, an antiwar movement or cultural resistance that can challenge its trajectory and impact. Such a movement, however, is bubbling up from below, with parents calling for a more informative way of rating TV shows to safeguard their children, teachers promoting media literacy, activists asking for corporate accountability, consumers demanding enforcement of antitrust laws, media watchers critiquing news coverage, critics seeking more meaningful program content, producers creating alternative work and independent producers like me agitating for better and fairer journalism.

That was then—what is now.

TREAT: IN CASE YOU HAVENT HEARD “NEWS GOO”

This is the song recorded by Polarity 1 and inspired by The More You Watch The Less You Know
Download and enjoy:
http://www.polarity1.com/fcwd9.html

ODE TO CLOBALVSION FROM THE POET MICHAEL SERNA

Michael is interning with us. He’d love to hear from. Mserna23@yahoo.com

Ode to Globalvision

On occasion, I turn on the Devil Box,
I tune in to CNN while I fold my socks.

To my dismay, I could see through the Orwellian haze,
Disillusioned, I cursed the Democrats and parted ways.

I saw Lou Dobbs foaming at the mouth and it brought me glee,
Hoping more would see how broken our government is and could be.

Media corporations consume the brains of their consumers,
Whilst, presenting the noxious reality of bourgeois interests on skewers, morsels of news and information offered as sacrifices to Mammon,

As the Democrats produce more sound and fury for their designs on Washington. Dr. Leary, where are you to guide the youth of my generation?

Sometimes I want to throw my t.v. out of the window and not just change the station.

Where are the ideals of those that wrote our constitution?

Why do we just consume and not rebel against this system of usury and prostitution?

Thomas Jefferson is rolling in his grave,

Sickened by the “Captains of Industry” that are nothing but fat knaves.

The sub prime market made working-class Americans subhuman beings

Is this greed, the motto on the dollar bill that confides in something all-seeing?

“Pessimism of the mind and optimism of the soul”, Antonio Gramsci once said,

Will we ever awake to tend to the flowers of humanity before they are withered and dead?

GREETING FROM SOUTH AFRICA TO GLOBALVISION

South Africa’s leading film producer Anant Singh writes from Durban South Africa, one of the media professionals around the world we have been privileged to work with:

I want to send you my Congratulations on your 20th anniversary.

Globalvision has achieved a lot in the twenty years and created content that is provocative, thoughtful and most importantly it dealt with the social fabric of the world, not only in America but in South Africa and most
countries confronted by burning social issues.

It seems as though we have known each other for more than twenty years an that we have been associated with Globalvision from its inception.

Your work in South Africa and your awareness of and support for the fight against apartheid, using the medium of film was an inspiration to me , as I
was doing similar things although being based in South Africa.

Your stories about arriving in South Africa to attend the funeral of Nobel Laureate, Albert Luthuli and being followed by the secret police is well known.

You and Globalvision have been a friend of South Africa and will continue to be so.

Globalvision’s survival and success in the tough world of broadcasting and content creation has been largely due to the ability of all of you, you and your team being able to act fast, produce efficiently and economically.

We are proud to have been associated with you on various films including Countdown to Freedom, the film that documented the fall of apartheid and the
first Democratic elections for South Africa, Prisoners of Hope, Hero for All and a few others.

On behalf of all of us at Videovision, we are thrilled and share your joy and we wish you all the best for your 20th Anniversary celebrations. We are sorry that we are not with you to celebrate.

Congratulations again and here’s to another twenty years ahead.

VIVA GLOBALVISION VIVA! VIVA DANNY VIVA! VIVA RORY VIVA!

And we say from the depths of our beings: VIVA THE PEOPLE OF SOUTH AFRICA WHO TOPPLED THE BEAST AND WON THE RIGHT TO START AGAIN. VIVA. AMANDLA. VIVA! We were honored to play a small role.

“TINY FLAGS OF JUSTICE

On Wednesday when I was at City Hall covering Jesse Jacksons announcement of the December l0TH MARCH ON WALLS STREET, none of us knew that there actually was march underway already against predatory lending. It was reported by Gawker.com and followed by stupid condescending comments. Dealbreaker.com then picked up the story with more posts, some even racist, others illuminating from folks who work in financeland.

WALL STREET PROTEST MADNESS UPDATE:

The protesters are apparently from the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition and the New York City Anti-Predatory Lending Task Force and they're walking up and down Wall Street protesting everyone else now. They are singing a song, to the tune of Jingle Bells. The words to the song are unclear. Our source reports: "There's only about 20 of them. They have tiny signs!" Tiny signs of justice!”

As someone from the Northwest Bronx, I am pleased to tell you about those tiny signs of justice—it is a start–and hope they come back on December l0th.

And if you are around, I hope you will join in as well.

Have a great weekend. Welcome December. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org