Whether we like to admit it or not, our opinions are influenced by the media, and when the media is in the hands of a few giant corporations, it is cause for concern. Think about the immense growth of the advertising industry. Billions of dollars every year, paid by big business to media outlets for access to your head, and a chance to influence your values and desires. Is this a natural way to exist? To want more and more material posessions in the hope that they will bring happiness, regardless of the environmentally and socially damaging practices that went into their manufacture?
The national agenda is set by what the media choose, or choose not, to print. The way news is presented, usually from the point of view of either the state or industry, rarely allows the voice of the average person to be heard. When some new development is hailed as "good for the economy", this usually translates as being good for banks and wealthy shareholders, and bad for workers. For example, a new supermarket opens, creating 200 jobs, but putting scores of smaller shops out of business, offering only low-paid, unskilled work, increasing traffic congestion and the resultant damage to the environment and public health, and forcing farmers out of business by paying rock-bottom prices for goods. Of course, a profitable business with fewer, lower paid employees sends share prices soaring, but for every cheap offer and "two for one" deal, there is a hidden cost. Supermarkets are an excellent example of this - a National Retail Planning Forum report showed that when a new supermarket opens there is an average net LOSS of 276 jobs as small local businesses are forced to close. We have to ask ourselves what is more important - being able to buy fifteen kinds of pasta sauce or having more jobs and a healthier community. But the only stories in the news are about the "supermarket wars" and which company is the most profitable and offers the cheapest goods and the best "value". Where is the value in employing of a legion of temporary checkout operators compared with the self-employed shopkeepers they have replaced?
Why is this the case? Why don't we see the full truth on TV or in the papers, where Sun readers and ITN news viewers can see and hear the real world rather than the biased, misinformed, advertiser-friendly version we actually end up with? The answer, albeit simpified, has already been answered, and is two-fold. The problem is a corporate media, owned by fewer and fewer interests, combined with the need to sell advertising and increase profits.
In any business, the customer is everything, and businesses must do whatever they can to keep their customers happy. The product that advertisers pay media companies so handsomely for, is us.
While we have an overwhelmingly privately owned media, we should never expect to hear the whole story. The whole, unbiased truth might actually make us stop and question the status quo, and that can never be good for profits. There will of course be grains of truth, but as is often the case, the story that goes untold reveals much more about the corporate media agenda.
Let me give an example - the 1954 US intervention in Guatemala, where the media in the USA was manipulated to make people believe there was a deadly Communist threat lurking in the Guatemalan jungle, in the form of democratic socialist (with no links to Moscow), Jacobo Arbenz. Following the first democratic elections in 1950, the Arbenz's new government had initiated land reforms which would benefit around 100,000 peasants and expropriate 234,000 acres of land from the US-owned United Fruit Company. This was obviously a threat to American business interests in the area, and ultimately the whole of Latin America. So, a US state / corporate campaign was put in motion to crush the threat of democracy and independant national sovereignty. Following a media and public relations operation that went to the highest levels of government, nothing less than a bloodbath ensued. Hundreds of union leaders and thousands of peasants were murdered in a US-backed terror campaign which Howard Hunt, Head of CIA Operations in Guatemala in 1954, likened to the Nazi blitzkreig.
The BBC's 2002 documentary series, "The Century of the Self" had an episode on events in Guatemala that followed the story right up until the massacres started. US involvement in the genocide was not reported, and neither was Guatemala's unfortunate position as just one of many Third World nations that had been and continue to be subjected to similar, if not worse, anti-democratic terror campaigns.
If we want a future where corporations and governments are unable to manufacture an atmosphere whereby they can literally get away with genocide, we need a mainstream media completely free of corporate and state influence. Public pressure, grassroots activism, and direct action can shorten or even prevent wars, stop environmental and humanitarian disasters (eg. Ilisu dam, Brent Spar). But as a society we are not free to act appropriately if our information is bogus or incomplete. If the truth about what the elite classes are up to was widely reported without fear, the journalistic culture of silence in the face of atrocity could be ended once and for all.