Structural Corruption - Understanding the Mass Media

What prospect joy or peace, Shantideva asks, if the “ancient enemies” of greed, hatred, and ignorance “find their lodging safe within my heart”?

And what prospect joy or peace if the same enemies find their lodging safe at the heart of the political and economic institutions that dominate our lives?

Consider that the mass media, for example, is made up of a small number of large corporations owned by even larger parent companies, and is deeply dependent on the support of corporate advertisers. The primary democratic responsibility of this “free press”? To report impartially on a world dominated by corporate power!

Robert Hinkley, 23 years a corporate securities attorney, explains how corporate law means that managers “have a legal duty to shareholders, and that duty is to make money.” Failing this duty, Hinkley writes, can leave directors and officers open to being sued by shareholders:

“Corporate law thus casts ethical and social concerns as irrelevant, or as stumbling blocks to the corporation’s fundamental mandate... It is the law that leads corporations to actively disregard harm to all interests other than those of shareholders. When toxic chemicals are spilled, forests destroyed, employees left in poverty, or communities devastated through plant shutdowns, corporations view these as unimportant side effects outside their area of concern. But when the company’s stock price dips, that’s a disaster.” [1]

Corporate law, in other words, establishes unrestrained greed not merely as an objective but as an “obligation” of corporate activity. And given, as Shantideva tells us, that selfish greed is the immortal enemy of compassion, love, reason, and happiness, then the unrelenting pursuit of profit must surely result in suffering.

Matrceta, the great poet and disciple of Aryadeva, predicted a remarkable set of conditions for a world overrun by greed in this way:

“Fierce robbers and enemies of the land abound, and those with wealth and ease cannot enjoy it. Truly beings suffer: all aspects of their lives become frightful. The rains fall out of season, and hailstorms endanger travellers. Cows do not give milk, the seasons are disrupted, and grain does not grow upon the earth. Medicines become ineffective: the more essential they are, the weaker they become. Controversies proliferate; arguments lacking logic or truth take over, and evil prevails.” [2]

As the globalization of capitalist greed proceeds apace, as huge smogs hang over entire nations in South East Asia, as giant plumes of low-level ozone swirl around the globe and we experience extreme phenomena associated with rapidly rising global temperatures, these predictions make arresting reading.

Owners, Advertisers, and “Flak”

To understand why “arguments lacking logic or truth take over” in our society, we need to understand the pressures influencing mass media performance.

The fact that media corporations are owned by large parent companies immediately creates a major conflict of interest. In the United States, NBC and CBS are owned by arms manufacturers General Electric and Westinghouse, respectively... Oil companies such as Exxon, Texaco, and Mobil have representatives on the boards of these media giants, as does Lockheed Martin, which builds the F-22 fighter. American media companies regularly report on wars being fought using their parent companies’ weapons.

In a 2000 Pew Centre for the People and the Press poll of 287 U.S. journalists and news executives, about one-third of respondents admitted that news that would “hurt the financial interests” of their media organization or advertisers goes unreported. Forty-one percent said they themselves had avoided stories, or softened their tone, to benefit their media company’s interests. [3]

Media corporations are also deeply dependent on big business advertising... Broadsheet newspapers in Britain and the United States are dependent on advertisers for around 75% of their revenue. According to the host of one U.S. Public Broadcasting Service show: “You cannot get a TV or a radio show on the air in America these days unless it targets an audience that corporations are interested in targeting and unless it carries a message that is acceptable to corporations...” [4]

A further constraint is the sheer weight of criticism, or “flak,” that can be directed at non-conformist media by powerful state-corporate institutions: think tanks, front groups, and political parties.

In 2003, Britain’s Labour government chose to draw attention to one early morning radio report by BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan criticizing Blair over Iraq. As a result of the ensuing government “flak” campaign, Gilligan, BBC chairman Gavyn Davies, and the BBC chief executive, Greg Dyke, were all forced to resign.

The consequences of the media’s profit-orientation are far-reaching and devastating. Writing in the Observer in October 2001, Peter Preston explained the rationale behind the widespread British media support for an immediate bombing campaign against Afghanistan. Media demands for action had begun at a time when aid agencies were pleading with the U.S. to refrain from bombing to allow aid convoys to reach 7.5 million starving Afghan people as winter approached. But Preston wrote of how, post-September 11, the media had their own problems:

“There is the collapse in advertising: Rupert Murdoch saw £69 million vanish with the twin towers. There are wage and hiring freezes in every newspaper... When the Times — and it is by no means alone — wants something decisive done on the ground before ‘the winter blizzards set in’.... it also wants a resolution that will set advertising flowing again and slash the coverage costs.” [5]

While editors focused on profit margins in comfortable offices, even the threat of bombing meant that aid convoys instantly ground to a halt. An emergency officer for Christian Aid warned: “It’s as if a mass grave has been dug behind millions of people. We can drag them back from it or push them in. We could be looking at millions of deaths.” [6] “The country was on a lifeline,” one evacuated aid worker reported, “and we just cut the line.” [7]

Bottom-line pressures mean that our media also consistently subordinate planetary health to profit. When a 2000 Time magazine series on environmental campaigners, sponsored by Ford Motor Company, failed to mention anti-car campaigners, Time’s international editor admitted to the Wall Street Journal: “We don’t run airline ads next to stories about airline crashes.” [8]

On January 8, 2004, Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported dramatic climate research suggesting that over the next fifty years, global warming could drive fully one-quarter of land animals and plants into extinction... On the same day, the Guardian carried large adverts for Citroen, Chrysler, Fiat, BMW, Toyota, Audi, and Lexus cars. It also featured ads for American Airlines, British Midland International and an easyJet low-price ticket sale: “everyone must go.” The American Airlines ad featured a 2 for 1 transatlantic flight offer. Air travel is a major contributor to global warming.

When readers raised this startling hypocrisy with the paper, the readers’ editor replied: “No one I have spoken to in the Guardian believes the curtailment of such offers, let alone airline advertising, is a serious option.” [9] How could even high-quality media like the Guardian dream of challenging the corporate devastation of our environment when they are so much a part of the system creating the problem?

Basic Principles

In reality, the combined effects of wealthy owners, parent companies, advertisers, and flak on media performance are dramatic. Noam Chomsky summarizes: “The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist.” [10] Thus, Western crimes abroad are generally downplayed or ignored altogether, while those of official enemies are massively hyped.

In 1953, with US-UK military support, a coup installed the Shah as leader of oil-rich Iran. In 1976, Amnesty International reported that, under the Shah, Iran had the “highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture” which was “beyond belief”. This was a society in which “the entire population was subjected to a constant, all-pervasive terror.” [11] Yet, in 1979, researchers William A. Dorman and Ehsan Omad wrote of the Shah: “We have been unable to find a single example of a news and feature story in the American mainstream press that uses the label ‘dictator.’” [12]

Likewise, the German ambassador to the Sudan estimated that, deprived of life-saving medicines, “tens of thousands” of Sudanese had died as a result of Bill Clinton’s cruise missile attack on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in August 1998. Next to nothing of this horrific reality was reported in the West. [13]

Filtering Compassion - Media ‘Muzak’

The media is part of a corporate system that relies on relentless mass consumption. If corporations are to continue maximizing profits for shareholders, then we need to be persuaded to embrace, not resist, Shantideva’s “ancient enemies” of greed, hatred, and ignorance. The impact of this materialist “monoculture” has been felt the world over.

In June 1999, Bhutan became the last nation on earth to gain access to television. Four years later local people were in uproar, blaming television and Western programs for an eruption of greed, anger and dissatisfaction. Bhutan’s national newspaper, Kuensel, carried weekly columns of correspondence from worried readers: "Dear Editor, TV is very bad for our country... it controls our minds... and makes [us] crazy. The enemy is right here with us in our own living room. People behave like the actors, and are now anxious, greedy and discontent..." [14]

This discontent is an inevitable consequence of the modern value system... American psychologist Tim Kasser of Knox College explains:

“People who are highly focused on materialistic values have lower personal well-being and psychological health than those who believe that materialistic pursuits are relatively unimportant. These relationships have been documented in samples of people ranging from the wealthy to the poor, from teenagers to the elderly, and from Australians to South Koreans." [15]

On the other hand, research is also demonstrating the benefits of reduced levels of craving, hostility and distraction, achieved through meditation. Psychologist Daniel Goleman notes: "For 30 years meditation research has told us that it works beautifully as an antidote to stress..." [16]

In his book, Destructive Emotions, Goleman goes much further, reviewing research conducted by the University of Wisconsin into the mind states of Buddhist monks meditating on compassion. The monks were found to be experiencing levels of happiness and peace of mind that far exceeded the norm. Goleman concludes: “The very act of concern for others' well-being, it seems, creates a greater sense of well-being within oneself." [17]

The point is that greed and compassion, craving and calm, are conflicting forces in the mind, as Sayadaw U Pandita writes: “When the mind is filled with energy, it becomes hot. This mental temperature has the power to dry up defilements. We can compare the kilesas [mental afflictions] to moisture; a mind devoid of energy is easily dampened and weighed down by them.” [18]

A mind devoid of energy is just ideal for advertisers, who favor TV programs that “flow seamlessly into commercials, avoiding controversy, lulling us into submission, like an electronic tranquillizer,” media analysts Michael Jacobson and Ann Mazur note. [19]

Children are singled out by advertisers for particular attention: the U.S. Consumers Union estimates that 30,000 commercial messages are targeted at American children each year. According to the CEO of Prism Communications, “They aren’t children so much as what I like to call ‘evolving consumers.’” [20]

Nancy Shalek, president of the Shalek Agency observes, “Advertising at its best is making people feel that without their product, you’re a loser. Kids are very sensitive to that... You open up emotional vulnerabilities, and it’s very easy to do with kids because they’re the most emotionally vulnerable.” [21]

This profitable manufacturing of discontent flies in the face of the most important teachings of human culture. Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, for example, observed:

“To wish happiness for others, even those who want to do us harm, is the source of consummate happiness.” [22]

But where do we see this view expressed in our media saturated with “shoot ‘em up” violence and “indulgence marketing”? If Hollywood is to be believed, the only rational response to harm is maximized harm in return.. Whizz-bang pyrotechnics, car chases, and endless violent ‘payback’ are a kind of mental muzak, emptying our minds of compassionate and critical thought that might interfere with commercial enticements.

The only realistic antidote to this promotion of greed and hostility, is mindful awareness rooted in compassion and concern for others. Only when large numbers of us wake up to the catastrophic costs of unrestrained greed – for ourselves, our families, for people and planet – only when we perceive the true benefits of altruism, compassion and peace of mind, will we gain the momentum to push for change.

We may be surrounded by confusion and crises on every side, but the Path Of Heroes points to a fundamental, unvarying solution:

“On this depends my liberation: to assist others – nothing else.” [23]

Rise of the “Citizen Reporters”

If we are serious about relieving human and animal suffering, we need to recognize that the mass media is an integral part of a corporate system that subordinates people and planet to profit. Compassion, reason, and kindness are not exempt from this subordination. Because they threaten to raise awareness, to cultivate dissent, they are filtered out of our media and replaced by a cold, glitzy hedonism. As a result many people do not know that concern for others is the bedrock of happiness. They do not know that anger and hatred are their real enemies. They do not know that desire is a false friend.

We need a mass media motivated by compassion rather than greed. We need, in fact, a noncorporate media. For the first time, the Internet is enabling truly independent, noncorporate journalists to reach a global mass audience, instantly, with almost zero resources.

Last year, photographs revealing both US military caskets and torture inside Abu Ghraib prison were based on digital photographs made, not by journalists, but by participants in both stories. American media analyst, Edward Herman, wrote: “My own view is that the media response is heavily dominated by the need to focus on an unwanted topic, their hands forced by outsiders who obtained and began circulating the photos.” [24]

Supported by websites and bloggers around the world, these “citizen reporters” represent a real challenge to the compromised intermediaries of corporate journalism: photographs of the Abu Ghraib tortures appeared on the streets of Baghdad a few minutes after they were published on the Net.

Websites played an equally important role in the unprecedented global protests against the 2003 Iraq war.

Like all technology, the Internet is a double-edged sword: it can be used for good or ill. It is up to us to ensure that this challenge to the media mainstream is rooted in reason and compassion, not in ignorance and hatred.

We are told that wisdom and compassion constitute the two wings of the bird of enlightenment – the liberation that promises an end to all suffering. In our time wisdom means understanding how greed, hatred and ignorance are promoted by the society that teaches us what it means to be a human being. It means equipping ourselves with the tools of intellectual self-defense. These include compassion and love, and a sense of personal responsibility for the suffering of others. But we also need independence of mind, critical thought, and a profound scepticism about all versions of reality presented to us as ‘just how the world is’.

Endnotes

1. Robert Hinkley, 'How Corporate Law Inhibits Social Responsibility', Business Ethics, January/February 2002.

2. Quoted, Zhechen Gyaltsab, Path Of Heroes (Dharma, 1995), 360.

3. 'Fear & Favor 2000 - How Power Shapes the News', www.fair.org.

4. Quoted, Sharon Beder, Global Spin (Green Books, 1997), 182.

5. Peter Preston, 'Too Much Jaw-jaw on War-war', The Observer, 21 October 2001.

6. Steven Morris and Felicity Lawrence, 'Afghanistan facing humanitarian disaster', The Guardian, 19 September 2001.

7. Quoted, Noam Chomsky, 'Lakdawala lecture', www.zmag.org, 30 December 2001.

8. Fair, 'Fear & Favor'.

9. Ian Mayes, 'Flying in the face of the facts', The Guardian, 24 January 2004.

10. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 79.

11. Martin Ennals, Amnesty, Autumn 1976.

12. William A. Dorman and Ehsan Omad, 'Reporting Iran the Shah’s Way', Columbia Journalism Review, January-February 1979.

13. Quoted, Noam Chomsky, 9-11 (Seven Stories Press, 2001).

14. Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, 'Fast forward into trouble', The Guardian, 14 June 2003.

15. Tim Kasser, The High Price Of Materialism (MIT Press, 2002), 22.

16. Quoted, Joel Stein, 'Just say OM', Time, 27 October 2003.

17. Daniel Goleman, Destructive Emotions - And How We Can Overcome Them (Bloomsbury, 2003), 12.

18. Sayadaw U Pandita, In This Very Life (Wisdom, 1992), 109.

19. Michael Jacobson and Ann Mazur, Marketing Madness (Westview Press, 1995), 43-44.

20. Quoted Beder, Global, 163.

21. Quoted, Kasser, Materialism, 91.

22. Quoted, Dilgo Khyentse, The Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones (Shambhala, 1992), 39.

23. Quoted, Gyaltsab, Heroes, 72.

24. Ed Herman, email to author, 13 May 2004.