http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDHJ4LN1l5M&feature=related
The media are “agents of those in power." They are in the business of creating a culture, a.k.a the culture industry. Diversity of the cultural realm is essential to the survival of democracy. That diversity has been dismantled, along with democracy. The Constitution was supposed to free culture from government and entrust it to “the marketplace of ideas.” Today, there is no form of media unregulated. Even if it is so-called “self-regulating,” the government still has say in content seeing how they provide funding and tax cuts to many major media conglomerates. The six major media conglomerates(News Corporation, Disney, General Electric, CBS Corporation, Time Warner, and Viacom) own the large majority of all media outlets, thus controlling the large majority of content distributed. This consolidation of content allows for the conglomerates to create a “Consciousness Industry” in which they attempt to produce a form of consciousness in the audience that benefits the class that owns the media. They control the context within which people think, define what is right and wrong, define social problems and their solutions, and how to behave in general.
The owners of these conglomerates sit on many boards and have many special interests world-wide that they are happy to promote via their media outlets. For example, debate over the arms race is almost completely absent from network TV because GE is a defense contractor for the government. Information about oil companies is compromised because oil representatives sit on boards of all the powerful news media. These examples are just a scratch of the surface of the kind of control over content that these major conglomerates and the powerful elite have.
Christian Saveoz
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