Last year the media and business world became alarmed with Jeff Bezos, the owner and founder of Amazon.com, purchased The Washington Post with money from his own pocket. Even though the Post is not directly an Amazon property, the slippage between Bezos’s personal and professional interests have been seen acutely in the pages of the paper since the purchase. Most notably is the way the Post covered Amazon’s announcement of Amazon Air, a futuristic method of delivering products with miniature unmanned aerial devices (drones).
Mostly, the Washington Post was uncritical of Amazon’s program but instead did a links roundup post of its own on some of the criticisms against Amazon in the wake of the announcement. The entire sequence of Bezos’s purchase is yet one more example of the uncomfortable and damaging ways that large corporations control influential media outlets and thus control the flow of information in the United States and beyond.
What are the problems with corporate influence over the media? Is there any other way? How do we get around the problems? As I started to think about some of these questions, I went all the way back to 1988 and Noam Chomsky’s influential book, Manufacturing Consent. Chomsky outlines the well-known facts about media oligarchy; only a few companies control the vast majority of books, magazines, internet sites, movies, and radio stations in the US. And as Chomsky points out in the introduction to his book, this process of global control tends to “weaken any sense of community helpful to civic life” but instead fosters an endless cycle of consumer capitalism.
This is one important issue, but another is the ways in which corporations work together to evade or downplay certain stories. Consider this infamous Bob Dylan video:
These magazines have too much to loose by printing the truth. It’s possible that Dylan was “compromised” in this video, but his point is important. Mainstream media caters to a class of people that don’t want to engage the cycles of war and global production that make their lives possible.
So what does this mean for us today? Can we remove ourselves from the clutches of corporate media?