The backdrop of the rant: It’s
the evening of June 8, 1999, and we’ve just watched the Bill Moyers PBS special,
"Free Speech for Sale." Yes, valid issues were raised and interesting points
made about the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (in which an estimated $70 billion worth of
publicly owned airspace—the so-called digital spectrum—was given away to big
corporations). But what got our goat was an exchange between Bill Moyers and Dean Alger,
the author of Megamedia.
Having laid out the facts that (a)
megacompanies buy out other megacompanies and (b) have interlocking ownership of smaller
companies (interlocking boards weren’t mentioned, though), Bill Moyers concluded
(rightly) that (1) not only do fewer and fewer companies own more and more media sources,
but (2) since their ownerships overlap, they don’t compete with each other. Quite the
contrary, they’re on each other’s teams. He even had a clever graphic showing
these few megacompanies’ symbols all crowding together, like some chummy club.
But because what’s owned here are
newspapers, publishing companies, television and radio stations, the public never hears
about all of this. And if stories arise that threaten the profits of any one of these
interlocking companies, those stories don’t get reported. The chummy club really
knows how to keep a secret. (It’s amazing there’s anything to report on the
news.)
Having laid out this monopolist’s
dream, Bill Moyers then posed a leading question to Dean Alger to the effect that this
situation doesn’t imply some conspiracy, does it? To which Alger replied, "There
doesn’t have to be a deep, dark conspiracy..." behind this "age-old
problem" of certain people trying to amass wealth and power at the public’s
expense.
Now, let’s see if we get this
straight. A few companies (the chummy club crowd) amass more and more wealth by using
their already existing wealth to steal $70 billion from the public and use their control
of the media to make sure the public doesn’t hear about it. It’s a theft pulled
off by a colluding few that remains a secret. But it’s not a conspiracy. The people
who run these megacompanies are just, well, greedy. And this concentration of ownership
just, well, happened (probably a new step in Darwinian evolution or something). After all,
it’s cost effective for these companies. If you own the media reporting on you, then
who needs to spend money on PR firms?
We can’t tell you how relieved we are
to hear this. It’s as if someone rides into your neighborhood with huge weapons,
steals your home, and pushes you out of the neighborhood, then tells you it’s not an
invasion, you can feel relieved. "Well, I may have been driven out by these big
weapons and lost everything, but thank God it wasn’t an invasion."
So a cabal of megacorporations may scheme
behind our backs and use their influence to get more power and use this particular power
to further enslave our minds while picking our pockets, but thank God it’s not a
conspiracy. These people are just in the age-old game of going after more wealth and
power. Doesn’t that make you feel better?
The subtext here is pretty clear: we just
have a problem with a few greedy folks. There’s nothing more serious than that going
on. So don’t think any more about it. This greed stuff has been going on for
centuries, and look, we’re all still here. Forget all those people who tell you to
look more deeply. Forget that you have ears that can hear, eyes that can see, and a mind
that thinks. Just hear, see, and think what we tell you—"all the news
that’s fit to print." We’ll even tell you about the bad stuff, and see,
it’s not that monstrous after all, is it? We can tell you where to file it in your
mind (under "greed"). So just listen to this program, discuss it with a few
friends, maybe read a book about it (especially the ones we mention on our show), and then
go back to your life. We’ll continue to run the world for you. After all,
there’s nothing you can really do to stop us (another recurring message in the show,
delivered with all seriousness and concern, but delivered nonetheless).
Now, we don’t pretend to know what
Bill Moyers’ intentions are in a program such as this. But we do know the impact the
program has on us, and it looks suspiciously like being led down yet another proverbial
garden path. So the conclusion of our rant is this: if it looks like a duck and walks like
a duck and quacks like a duck, it won’t turn into an eagle by Bill Moyers or Dean
Alger saying it’s not a duck: "There’s no conspiracy here!"
With our thanks to
Merriam-Webster’s 1998 Collegiate Dictionary, we’ll close with a few dictionary
definitions:
Conspiracy: 1) the act of
conspiring together; 2a) an agreement among conspirators; 2b) a group of conspirators
Conspirator: one that
conspires: plotter
Conspiration: 1) the act or
action of plotting or secretly combining; 2) a joint effort toward a particular end
Conspiracy of silence: a
secret agreement to keep silent about an occurrence, situation, or subject especially in
order to promote or protect selfish interests.
Responses to the Above :
Steve Lehman:
You're right on target with the rant. And
the REALLY scary part is that Bill Moyers is supposed to be one of the GOOD guys. Yet his
interest in defending some large measure of our perceptual status quo (which has, after
all, been pretty good to him) overrides his journalistic impulse to dig for the truth, and
pulls him up short just at the most critical point, the point where he's ready to take the
leap to root causes.
I particularly like your invasion analogy.
It IS about being told how to mentally categorize experience. And of course it's the same
idea you discuss in the "How We Respond to Pain" essay: FIRST, "it's not
really pain"; SECOND, "okay it's pain, but it's no big deal, it'll go
away"; THIRD, "okay, it's pain, and it does hurt, but if you just go to the mall
and buy some stuff (take a pill, watch TV, drink a quart of Vodka) it'll feel
better"; and FINALLY, "okay, it's pain, and it's bad, and let that be a lesson
to you--if you continue to misbehave and ask questions and try to make sense of things,
then you're just getting what you deserve."
FIRST, "it's not a conspiracy";
SECOND, "okay, it's kind of a conspiracy, but not really--it's just greed";
THIRD, "okay it's technically a conspiracy, but nobody's meeting in smoke-filled
rooms or Swiss chalets plotting all this out, it just sort of happens naturally"; and
FOURTH, "okay, it's a conspiracy, but it's so big you can't possibly do anything
about it, so go to the mall, have a martini, etc."
Corporate America uses this progression
every day, and if you persist in discussing the pain or the conspiracy or the fundamental
lack of integrity in the process or the self-destructive nature of our behavior, they just
shake their heads and give you your walking papers, because you obviously just don't have
the right stuff to work for such a dynamic, high-powered, positive-thinking, progressive
enterprise as (fill in the blank).
Links to Related
Material :
Truth
By Decree