The power, reach and capacity to misinform minds and cultures on a massive scale by ideologically monotheistic and technologically carnivorous media empires was feared and largely foreseen in the 1970s by prescient organisations and figures who were concerned about the impact of the increasingly globalised and commercialised Western media on poorer and less powerful societies with their own distinct and ancient cultures and customs.
These concerns were voiced and sought to be countered most prominently by two inter-governmental organisations, the Non-Aligned Movement and UNESCO, which germinated the idea for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), epitomisedby the 1980 Report of the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems, which was wishfully titled, Many Voices, One World.
It also came to be known as the MacBride Report, named after Sean MacBride, the human rights activist who headed the 16-member commission set up by Unesco in 1977 “to study the totality of communication problems in modern societies”. MacBride was a person independent convictions who had as a young man participated in the Irish War of Independence and was later to hold the unique distinction of winning both the Nobel Peace Prize (1974) and the Lenin Peace Prize (1977). He was also a founder member and Chairman of Amnesty International from 1961 to 1974.
Some of the concerns and fears voiced by UNESCO and the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1970s have materialised more forcefully than envisaged and in forms which were not forecast. Some other concerns have been overtaken by political, economic and cultural twists which were not that visible in the 1970s.
One of the most significant points of reference of the MacBride Report was the concentration of media control in the hands of a few transnational corporations, as noted in the following passage: “We can sum up by stating that in the communication industry there is a relatively small number of predominant corporations which integrate all aspects of production and distribution, which are based in the leading developed countries and which have become transnational in their operations. Concentration of resources and infrastructures is not only a growing trend, but also a worrying phenomenon which may adversely affect the freedom and democratisation of communication. Concentration and transnationalisation are the consequences, perhaps inevitable, of the interdependence of various technologies and various media, the high costs of research and development, and the ability of the most powerful firms to penetrate any market. The trends have their counterparts in many industries; but communication is not an industry like any other. Transnational corporations have a special responsibility in today’s world, for, given that societies are heavily dependent upon them for the provision of information, they are part of the structure that fosters the development of economic and social models, as well as uniformity in consumer behaviour unsuitable to many local environments”.
The expansion and centralised control of media empires has grown at a dizzying pace to gargantuan sizes. In September 1995, Time Warner, the second biggest communication corporation in the world, announced its decision to combine with another American giant, Turner Broadcasting System, which operates the worldwide CNN television network, to emerge as the largest communication, information and entertainment empire in the world, beating Walt Disney/Capital Cities/ABC to second place. Disney had decided on 31 July 1995 to buy Capital Cities/ABC. Disney’s takeover of Capital Cities which owns the ABC TV and radiobroadcast
Both these mergers show that communication companies have leap-frogged towards worldwide ownership and control of every aspect of the communication process from production to distribution and every channel of information and entertainment from movie production studios, TV production facilities, information technology systems, news collection networks and commissioned authors to satellite and cable TV transmission systems, newspapers and magazines, book publishing and access to computer internets.
On 1 August 1995, CBS, another major American TV and radio network, agreed to be taken over by Westinghouse Electric for US$5.4 billion while a third major American TV and radio network, NBC, is already owned by General Electric, which is a major defence contractor and one of the world’s biggest producers of power generation equipment, electrical systems and jet engines for aircraft. Since 1941, General Electric has had five convictions for crimes including conspiracy (twice), fraud and tax evasion. Transnational industrial corporations like General Electric have realised the worth of communications networks both as profit centres and as strategic allies for influencing public opinion, however indirectly. Advertisers, consumers, TV and radio audiences, newspaper and magazine readers are faced with the possible prospect of having little choice except to become captives of these huge conglomerates, though this has not always happened for reasons which are explained later.
Supporters of these communication supermarkets are cruising down an “information superhighway” with infinite and varied choices. But quite the opposite seems to be happening. There are many more media outlets but they provide canned news from the same sources. For instance, newspapers all over the world, have reduced the number of their own foreign correspondents and increasingly rely on big news agencies such as Reuter and Associated Press (AP). Reuter also owns Visnews and partly owns WTN, both big television news agencies, which are major providers of televised news clips to TV stations all over the world. In 1945, more than 80per cent of US media outlets were independent. In 1994, just 23 corporations owned more than 80per cent of media outlets in the US.
Democratic and individual choice has been short-circuited by these concentrations of corporate power effectively aided and abetted by their governments. The MacBride Commission, then actively supported by UNESCO and the Non-Aligned Movement, had sought to keep alive the embers of democratic choice in the sphere of communication and information but in a classic piece of disinformation was accused by the US and British governments of trying to impose censorship and control on the media. The US government officially withdrew from UNESCO in December 1984, followed a year later, by the British government. The Singapore government, then a compatriot of the US and Britain, also walked out of UNESCO.
Part IV of the MacBride Report’s recommendations was on ‘Democratisation of communication’. Recommendation 58 in PartIV succinctly sought measures to remove obstacles in the way of democratisation of communication. Recommendation58 stated that “Effective legal measures should be designed to: (a) limit the process of concentration and monopolisation; (b) circumscribe the action of multinationals by requiring them to comply with specific criteria and conditions defined by national legislation and development policies; (c) reverse trends to reduce the number of decision-makers at a time when the media’s public is growing larger and the impact of communication is increasing; (d) reduce the influence of advertising upon editorial policy and broadcast programming; (e) seek and improve models which would ensure greater independence and autonomy of the media concerning their management and editorial policy, whether these media are under private, public or government ownership”.
The possible dangers posed to India and other countries of the Third World by the entry of Western-dominated media giants is vividly portrayed by a prominent Indian jurist, V.R. Krishna Iyer: “Never forget that powerful media are often the propagandist fronts of industrial tycoons. Giant firms, especially in consumer industries, mount expensive advertising campaigns as victory belongs to those who dazzle the consumer the most. Sex and other appetisers are used to win markets. The primary motivation of free-booter enterprises, in our capitalist globorama,is maximising money making thro’ business skulduggery. Investments in politicians and in the media owners is part of business and success goes to those who have under their control mind manufacturing, opinion manipulating and psychic tampering thro’media, print and electronic. Calvin Coolidge long ago said: ‘The business of America is business’.. . In practical terms, the information- communication operation is a catalytic converter used by the multinational corporations to drug the Third World into the spell of willing victimisation”.
The drugging effect of television in particular is further explained by an Indian sociologist, Darshan Singh Maini. No other media outlet can compete with television in its assault on the senses, on the mind and on the imagination. The commercialisation of television with its umbilical connection to the advertising industry has reduced it to offering great doses of visual gimmickry and false emotions, subjecting the popular mind, particularly the child mind, to a compulsive addiction to attractive trash. TV can become a “brain chocolate” for children, though it can also serve as a great educator if it transmits intriguing and sensitive programmes.
The commercial push for high audience ratings usually leads to thoughtful and complex programmes being cast aside in favour of entertaining and populist programming in the West as also in many other areas of the world. Some of these populist programmes can have a political message of mass emotional arousal of racist or sectarian tendencies. Maini provides the example of the screening by Doordarshan, the government-owned and controlled TV network in India, of popular versions of the Hindu religious epics which helped create a militant Hindu consciousness which was exploited by neo-fascist Hindu political groups like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), leading in turn to a “carnival of communal frenzy” of attacks against the Muslim minority in India.
As Maini observes, “This should give us an idea of the power of the ‘telly’ to invade the nervous system and destroy the moral defences of man. It also destroys the imagination of adjustment, accommodation and resilience. It is thus that all fundamentalisms and fascisms are born”.
Television has been far more widely used to arouse fascist male sexual fantasies by transmitting nasty and violent sexual messages, driven again by the commercial and advertising drive. Maini explains: “I have not touched so far on TV’s most powerful appeal, that of sexual excitement and erotic fantasies. It is today the single biggest purveyor of voyeurism or peep-hole sex. A titillation industry, in short. Combine with sadism, and even with pure terror , it has a tendency to degenerate into the pit of evil. In glorifying sexual violence, and in the abuse of the female body, it sets up obsessive images. The ‘idiot box’ turns into a whore for the dreaming youth, and a proxy for the aged. Its role in the promotion of ‘evil sexuality’ is now widely recognised. So the magic that opens up the universe for us is at the same time a mischief machine”.
J. Richard Munro, a former Co-Chairman of Time Warner, the American media giant, does not regard TV and the electronic media as mischief machines. According to Munro, “The true magic of the new machines is not so much in the engineering or the design of the hardware as in the capabilities and capacities it creates for software. With this software, a free market of the human mind is coming into existence, a market for images, information and entertainment unconstrained by physical frontiers or ideological boundaries. And more often than not, the choices people make involve American software. The medium maybe made in Korea or Japan or Taiwan, but the message is made in the USA”.
Munro rejects the premise that people are lured to buy American cultural produce by the seductive power of “glitzy, glittering junk”. He claims: “Today the best of America’s publications, films, programming and videos are as good or better than those produced by any other country. And we produce more quality products than they ever hope to. That’s why they’ve been so interested in buying American media and entertainment properties. But there’s another reason besides quality that explains the demand for our products, a deeper cause, an explanation that drives to the heart of so-called American cultural imperialism.
“All over the globe people associate the American style with a way of existence that to one degree or another they wish to share in. The freedom they want is the freedom they see embodied in the images and idiom of America - an idiom that is optimistic and democratic, with abiding faith in the ability of people to decide for themselves in small things as well as large”.
There has been resistance to the images sought to be sold around the world by the Americans. Nations across the globe have tried to restrict foreign programmes, particularly American TV serials and Hollywood films, from appearing on their domestic TV channels. The European Union (EU), egged on by the French, has carried on a long battle to try and stipulate that at least 51 per cent of all TV programmes in member nations are of European origin. French law requires that 60 per cent of all TV programming in French be produced by companies within the EU and that half of this total, or 30 per cent, be produced by French companies. Canada restricts foreign investment in publishing, TV and radio broadcasting, and cable TV.
With the advent of satellite TV for which the skies are open, some countries, including Malaysia, Singapore and China, have prevented transmissions from the sky from reaching the ground by legally restricting private individuals from owning or setting up their own satellite receiver dishes. Indian dithered about how to deal with foreign (and domestic) satellite broadcasts and has by default allowed satellite channels to be viewed by any Indian family willing to pay a nominal fee to one of the 60,000 unlicensed private neighbourhood operators who put up a large dish and supply the neighbourhood through cables with satellite programmes. These small cable operators were gradually being bought over by a few big Indian companies in 1995.
Cable-satellite TV has not resulted in the Indian viewer being over whelmed by a flood of foreign programmes. Most Indian viewers have shown their marked preference for Indian programmes broadcast by Indian companies using foreign-owned satellite networks. The most popular of these Indian companies is Zee TV. Most of the Zee TV’s programmes are in Hindi, India’s national language, and are racy and bold. Even ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’, the sexy American TV serial, broadcast to India on another channel by Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV network, cannot compete with the sauciness of Indian serials. Zee TV is so popular that Star TV has bought a 50 per cent stake in it.
The most popular channels in India, however, are the ones controlled by Doordarshan, which remains a government department and transmits its programmes through both terrestrial and satellite channels. Most rural viewers do not have access to cable-satellite TV and, more significantly, Doordarshan regularly broadcasts films and serials produced by ‘Bollywood’, the Bombay film industry, which excels Hollywood in churning out violent and vulgar fantasies. As mentioned earlier, Doordarshan has also broadcast a series of popular religious epics which have had violent political repercussions.
Even in the cosmopolitan colony of Hong Kong, the programme that achieved some of the highest audience ratings in 1993 was ‘Pao, the Judge’, a Cantonese-dubbed drama series from Taiwan about an honourable judge in 19th century China. This and other locally-oriented programmes produced and broadcast by TVB, a Hongkong Chinese company, have led to TVB stealing a long march over Star and other Western-controlled companies in Hongkong and in the region. TVB with its vast archive of Chinese period dramas and variety shows has expanded into Taiwan and to Chinese communities all over Southeast Asia, and looks set to move into the southern areas of mainland China. Its Vietnamese dubbed dramas are also gaining popularity in Vietnam. Western media conglomerates were attempting to buy into TVB but were being resisted by the local owners and management.
Munro’s thesis has been disproved by millions of Indians, Chinese and Southeast Asians deciding for themselves that they are not interested in watching alien idioms and images of American or European origin.
In another sphere, the resistance to Western programming has been so strong that Murdoch’s worldwide network, News Corp, has been forced to eat humble pie at the Chinese government’s banquet. Murdoch challenge the Beijing leadership in September 1993 by rashly declaring that satellite broadcasting and the information age posed an “unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere”. Just six weeks earlier, Murdoch’s News Corp had acquired 64 per cent control of the Star TV network which beams into China and into many other Asia countries.
A month after Murdoch’s declaration, China banned the private ownership of satellite dishes, largely cutting off Star’s occasionally offensive programmes. With access to the large Chinese market (the number of TV sets had grown to 230 million at the end of 1992 from 27 million a decade earlier) cut off, Murdoch had to retreat. He dropped BBC TV news transmissions to China to placate Beijing and sold control of the Hongkong daily newspaper, South China Morning Post, which was noted to be close to the British colonial establishment. After a wait of almost two years, Murdoch has been allowed to set up business ventures in China but only after he has in effect self-censored Star programmes beamed into China.
The obvious truth to emerge from these media battles is that the media has to be culture specific and sensitive to local cultural and political concerns if it wishes to attract bigger audiences of viewers and readers.
