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The corporate interlocking listings below provide evidence that our
concept of a MSM needs updating. Mainstream Monopoly, perhaps? KwC Big
Media Interlocks with Corporate America
by
Peter Phillips, Published on Friday, June 24, 2005 by
CommonDreams.org Mainstream
media
is the term often used
to describe the collective
group of big TV, radio and newspapers in the United States. Mainstream implies that the news
being produced is for the benefit and enlightenment of the mainstream population-the majority of
people living in the US.
Mainstream media include a number of communication mediums that carry almost
all the news and information on world affairs that most Americans receive. The word media is plural, implying a
diversity of news sources.
However, mainstream
media no longer produce news for the mainstream population-nor should we
consider the media as plural. Instead it is more accurate to speak of big media
in the US today as the corporate media and to use the term in the singular
tense-as it refers to the singular monolithic top-down power structure of
self-interested news giants. A research team at Sonoma State
University
has recently finished conducting a network analysis of the boards of directors
of the ten big media organizations in the US. The team determined that only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten
big media giants.
This is a small enough group to fit in a moderate size university classroom.
These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288
national and
international corporations.
In fact, eight out of ten big
media giants
share common memberships on boards of directors with each other. NBC and the
Washington Post both have board members who sit on Coca Cola and J. P. Morgan,
while the Tribune Company, The New York Times and Gannett all have members who
share a seat on Pepsi. It is kind of like one big happy family of interlocks
and shared interests. The following are but a few of the corporate board
interlocks for the big ten media giants in the US:
Can we trust the news editors at the Washington Post to be
fair and objective regarding news stories about Lockheed-Martin defense
contract over-runs? Or can we assuredly believe that ABC will conduct critical
investigative reporting on Halliburton's sole-source contracts in Iraq? If we
believe the corporate media give us the full un-censored truth about key issues
inside the special interests of American capitalism, then we might feel that
they are meeting the democratic needs of mainstream America. However if we believe - as increasingly
more Americans do- that corporate media serves its own self-interests instead
of those of the people, than we can no longer call it mainstream or refer to it
as plural. Instead we need to say that corporate media is corporate America,
and that we the mainstream people need to be looking at alternative independent
sources for our news and information. Peter Phillips is a professor of Sociology
at Sonoma State University and director of Project Censored a media research
organization. www.projectcensored.org
Sonoma State University students Bridget Thornton and Brit Walters conducted
the research on the media interlocks. http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0624-25.htm |
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