Murdoch Almighty: When the Public Loses Opinion

I don't always find GlobalResearch.ca to have a balenced view of the world. However, everyone once in a while, there is a well written article that addresses the truth in a way that is seldom available in the big money dominance of the new media in the US. Here is an article written by a Palestinian activist whose views are present and openly stated, however his point about the media and the "marketplace of ideas" is much the same as the point made by Al Gore a year ago. This is a well written piece. The whole article is worth the read. Here is an excerpt of the key points.

[...]an article in The Guardian on 1 July by Lance Price, former media advisor to the British prime minister, brought the topic [of public spheres, i.e. public opinion] back to mind. Price asserted that media tycoon Rupert Murdoch was arguably the most powerful man in the media world today. Murdoch, an Australian-born US citizen, literally owns a significant share in public opinion through his control of the world's largest media conglomerates.


"I have never met Mr Murdoch, but at times when I worked at Downing Street he seemed like the 24th member of the cabinet. His voice was rarely heard [but, then, the same could have been said of many of the other 23] but his presence was always felt," Price wrote.


Murdoch "attended many crisis meetings at the Home Office -- the influence of the Murdoch press on immigration and asylum policy would make a fascinating PhD thesis," the author of the best-selling The Spin Doctor's Diary added. "There is no small irony in the fact that Tony Blair flew halfway round the world to address Mr Murdoch and his News International executives in the first year of his leadership of the Labour Party and that he's doing so again next month [July, 2006] in what may prove to be his last."


Shocking as they may seem, the revelations of Price, a man once intimately involved in the workings of the British government, appear utterly consistent with the strengthening bond between the mainstream media and governments in Western democracies. Such a bond is equally, but especially visible in the United States.


But the relationship between states and media become even the more dangerous when both team up -- and not by accident -- on the same ideological turf. Murdoch is a right-wing, pro-Israeli (widely known to be a personal friend of Ariel Sharon), pro-war ideologue. In 2003, every editorial page of his raft of 175 newspapers around the world touted the same pro-war mantras. Some might have innocently deduced that the "world's media" were all inadvertently converging on a consensus that sees President Bush as someone who is "acting very morally [and] very correctly", to borrow Murdoch's own language, and that such convergence is a reflection of the overall international public consensus on the matter. Reality, however, was starkly different.


Of course, Murdoch, who owns numerous newspapers, TV stations and news services throughout the world is not the exception, but the norm. In fact, a greater convergence is constantly taking place in the media world in the United States, which gives a few individual media conglomerates unprecedented ownership of thousands of radio and television stations, newspapers, magazines, etc. While some still laud the "freedom of the press", little aware of who owns what, democracy is being greatly compromised: the "life-world" is conceding like never before to the ever-encroaching "system", and a true "public sphere" is almost non-existent, at least in any meaningful form.


While states cannot prevent events or guarantee absolute power for themselves, they've understood the inimitable value of the media in its ability to forge a favourable climate of public opinion that seems incidentally consistent with that of the state. In exchange, the commercial and even ideological interests of those who own the media are always guaranteed. As long as such a correlation is not fully recognised and disabled, true democracy will continue to experience a frightening decline, whereby meaningful participatory democracy is replaced by mere democracy rhetoric used to satisfy political, ideological, and ultimately imperialistic ends. Without a crucial awakening that gives the public back what is rightfully theirs -- its opinion, its public sphere and its democracy -- this downward spiral is likely to continue.