[EDITORIAL]: Murdoch and GE “Charming” New Suit Further Threaten our Democratic Values and Media System
Two recent news items raise alarming signals that the Free Culture movement needs to confront.
One, according to The New York Times, the Bancroft family, who own The Wall Street Journal, are meeting with Rupert Murdoch on Monday regarding his offer to purchases the paper. At first, the family rebuffed his offers, but the Wily Coyote with his Aussie-fox hunting instincts, put on the charm show, using his good-looking kids as bait and now he’s gotten a meeting. [Postscript] According to reports from Monday’s meeting, Murdoch didn’t submit to the family’s demands for editorial independent and offers something similar The Times of London, where he ultimately fired the editor-in-chief and impacted editorial.
Two, GE just appointed a new “charming” young suit, Ben Silverman, the ex-William Morris Agency, which as Scott Collins wrote in The Los Angeles Times,
The Silverman résumé has two notable achievements so far. As an agent at William Morris, and later as the head of his own production company, Reveille, he has helped import and develop successful shows that started in overseas markets, including “The Office,” “Ugly Betty” and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” And, perhaps more important, he has openly courted advertisers eager for more creative input, including product placements, on prime-time shows, resulting in such sponsorship-laced outings as The Restaurant.’ (link)
Later on, Silverman reveals his true not-so-charming colors “that advertisers are ‘demanding’ more input, and ‘we’re going to work with the creative roster to deliver it.’” GREATTTT. Our public airwaves will become increasingly embedded with consumer “placements” and the notion that creative work should appear on broadcast television will soon seem quaint. The MPAA failed on their first go-around to enact the “Broadcast Flag,” the new digital right management system which would enclose your digital television set and restrict your ability to copy or save shows (as you can now in some ways w/ DVR). We know that the MPAA is manuevering and wants something like the Broadcast Flag passed. So on one hand, NBC wants to police your TV viewing with the Broadcast Flag and on the other hand, embed their shows (shouldn’t we call them show-placements) with increasingly noxious, consumer brand partnerships. And NBC/GE thinks this is innovation?!!! Way to give another opening to the next GooTubers!
Back to Murdoch, The Los Angeles Times‘ Tim Rutten wrote a powerful column, “Mr. Murdoch: Clear out of the Street,” explaining why Murdoch cannot be allowed to take-over, urr, purchase The Street (link). Next week, Free Culture movements nation-wide just will need to get on our “social networks,” contact MoveOn, see what positions/initiatives they’re taking to oppose this (we assume) and raise some hell on the blogasphere, seriously bringing up the volume with some defeaning noise. The Bancroft family needs to hear the public loud and clear: that Murdoch cannot be allowed to buy this company.
The struggle to “free” our media system must address macro-level, societal issues in our mainstream system. Everyday people depend on these outlets; the majority of them neither read blogs nor may have the time nor means to increase their broadband connectivity today. First, Manuel Castells and Amelia Arsenault documented in their powerful paper, “Conquering the minds, conquering Iraq: the social production of misinformation in the United States – a case study” (link to pdf on Castell’s homepage. Scroll down to “Manuel Castells Recent Writing”) how Murdoch exploited his media outlets leading up to the Iraq War:
In the lead-up to the Iraq War, the Bush administration rallied the American public for war via claims that they held unassailable evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and through the insinuation that links existed between Iraq and al Qaeda, and Iraq and the 11 September 2001 attacks. Despite the introduction of compelling evidence that these claims were false, more than 18 months after the official end of the war half of the American population continued to believe that either weapons of mass destruction had been found or that Iraq possessed a developed program for creating them. The prevalence of these misperceptions suggests important questions: How and why could such a significant percentage of the population remain so misinformed? What was the social process leading to the widespread adoption of misinformation? And what were the political effects of these misperceptions? This article proposes an analytical model that outlines both the production of these misperceptions and their political ramifications. It argues that the misperceptions about the Iraq war were socially produced via a complex interaction between a variety of factors including: the general climate of fear in America in the post-9/11 era, Bush administration agenda-setting strategies, and brokering between the political and communication establishments.
Politicians need’s to curry up to Murdoch for political favor and donations (witness his new friendship with Hilary) and of course, Murdoch’s politics and corporate interests evolve as businesses opportunities arise to meet consumer interests. The Journal is a powerful brand for Murdoch who understands well that Fox must distinguish its’ content as it flows though digital networks. Fox is launching its own financial news cable service and such brands are invaluable to any start-up. Furthermore, MySpace, overun by spam and flooded by trolls, seems to be losing momentum to Facebook. Thus, the need to establish “brand integrity” for numerous Fox properties has never been more urgent.
Second, the sly Fox wants have it both ways. The public, respectable charming Murdoch and Chernin fly to New York and meet the Murdoch clan while on the down-lo Fox’s copyright, business affairs lawyers employ Intellectural Property Rights (IPR) to intimidate those who want to share content on peer-peer networks. Literally as Murdoch is probably meeting with the Bancrofts, Diggs reports that “a man who uploaded four episodes of the hit series ‘24′ to a YouTube-style video hosting site has been tracked down by the FBI and is now being threatened with 3 years in a federal prison.” As TorrentFreak reported, Fox in concert with the FBI treat Chicago resident Jorge Romero who uploaded the first 4 episodes of this season’s ‘24′ to a YouTube-style site before it aired on TV with 3 years in jail.
We are living in strange time when individuals who want to utilize transformative technological tools are treated like terrorists while real terrorists are ignored while our country is stuck in a War partitially fueled by our broken, mainstream media’s inability to report the complex, surreals ways in which power is used in a Network Society by thugs like Murdoch.
Manuel Castells’ work on social movements explains how such a rabid “blogasphere” can “rise up” against AACS, but sit quiet while the chains are made tighter thanks to the Fox. Castells distinguishes between a social movement’s resistance and project identity. The former occurs when Digg users rise up in anger and “resist” the big, bad Hollywood consortium, AACS, of which Fox is a member. The transition from a resistance to a project occurs when people see the inter-connections in a Network society, listen and understand how people suffer when globalization runs riot and is manufacated in specific ways according to studio chieftans like that pimp-Murdoch. Then, the project arises when people rise up for the longer struggle to re-assert democratic values.
People rarely change their true “human nature,” especially if they aren’t in 12-step programs (like HBO’s chief) and somehow I doubt Murdoch is ready to fully atone for his past actions. We know his “higher power:” the billions for which the younger members of the Bancroft family are hungry. This ability to have it both ways also plays itself out on MySpace where kiddies are encouraged to Mashup videos, but Fox’s Copyright hounds employ the DMCA “take-down” notices like rabid, horny dogs (for example see link).
The great irony is this: Murdoch is able to play this “good cop, bad copy” - this “innovative” Fox new media-YourSpace-OurNow-”respectable”-journalism b.s. - while his corporate lawyers employ copyright just like the AACS (urrr remember, Fox actually is a member of AACS), which bullied Digg and threaten “hackers” like Romero with three years in prison! But it feels much better to rise up in anger when your hippity-Diggity site is under threat compared to a crusty old media-dinosour like the WSJ.
We need to show the corporate sharks that unlike the 90s when they succeeded time and time again in shutting down or taking over important companies that do good work (remember Napster), it won’t be so easy this time. A project identity arises when people take action. Join this Facebook Group, “Opposing News Corp.’s Proposed Takeover of Dow Jones!” (link). Democracies depend on citizens receiving and debating the news in a civil society. We’re down to maybe 3-4 good National newspapers. We can’t risk losing such an important one at the hands of a man, Murdoch, with a clear record of shunning democratic values and employing propaganda tactics as needed.
Over the last decade with the rise of the Internet, the struggle to promote freedom and human rights has entered a new stage. Access to knowledge and broadband connectivity provide us with unimaginable gateways to cultural riches. At the same time, as Castells writes in his most recent paper, “Communication, Power and Counter-power in the Network Society” (link), there is a “direct link between politics, media politics, the politics of scandal, and the crisis of political legitimacy in a global perspective.” In a sober warning given basic human nature so evident in Iraq and Murdoch’s role in promoting the invasion of that country, Castells closes, “Thus, as in previous historical periods, the emerging public space, rooted in communication, is not pre-determined in its form by any kind of historical fate or technological necessity. It will be the result of the new stage of the oldest struggle in humankind: the struggle to free our minds.” A new spirit of humility and comittment is needed, one that seems very far away.
POSTSCRIPT: Enjoy this amazing video by Faithless “Bombs,” which Murdoch’s AACS friends over at MTV banned (and of course his war-mongering is in some way responsible for all the Americans, and Iraqis, who will die (and have already) over in the country-we’re-all-so-tired-or-maybe-or-r-finally(a little late)-angry about. We wonder if members of the “creative class,” those hip San Francisco-digger had more siblings serving in Iraq, would that deepen their empathy for the soldiers dying because of our society’s failure (link to story about real cost in lives - Memorial Day ‘07), which Fox News and Murdoch exacerbated in the ‘04 presidential campaign - go resistance! [youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=2Xiec27yF-Y]