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coverage reveled in mayhem. If there are no good disasters in the vicinity, the local news uses the wonders of satellite technology to import them: One night, a Detroit station led with footage of a bus that had crashed into the Charles River in Boston. A study of the 11:00 news done by the Detroit News (just for the record, a scab newspaper) found that only 2 percent of the local news focused on the government and politics—that translates into eighteen seconds! There was zero coverage of poverty, education, race relations, environmental problems, science, or international a¤airs during the two months of the study. Watching the local news in Detroit, you would never know there was a state legislature , a state court system, or a governor. Just when citizens need increased journalistic oversight of state government, they are getting almost none at all. Clinton and his Republican allies are devolving responsibility for public programs to the states, welfare being the most deplorable example, and the local media show no capacity for monitoring the states’ actions. Instead, the onslaught of body-bag journalism bludgeons the viewer into a state of cynicism, resignation, and fear—sentiments that serve a conservative agenda. George Gerbner, the former dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, called it the “mean-world syndrome.” Simply put, the more TV you watch, the more inclined you are to exaggerate the level of crime in society, and to exaggerate your own vulnerability to crime. People who watch a lot of TV are much more likely to favor punitive approaches to crime—such as building more prisons and extending the death penalty—than are light viewers. The orgy of mayhem on the local news isn’t just revolting. It is dangerous. So, tonight, when they’re zooming in on the bloodstains on the pavement, call them up. Tell them you hate it. More important, call their sponsors. Tell them you’d be inclined to buy their products, but you just feel too queasy to shop. —Susan Douglas is a professor of communications at the University of Michigan and the author of The Mommy Myth. She also is a senior editor at In These Times. Oligopoly The Big Media Game Has Fewer and Fewer Players Robert W. McChesney november 1999 When Viacom announced its o¤er to gobble up CBS for $37 billion in September, it capped o¤ a decade of unprecedented deal-making and concentration in the media industries. The new Viacom would be one of only nine massive conglomerates—all of which took their present shape in the last Wfteen years—that dominate the U.S. media landscape. McChesney / Oligopoly 193 These giants—Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Viacom, Sony, Seagram, AT&T/Liberty Media, Bertelsmann, and GE—to a large extent furnish your TV programs, movies, videos, radio shows, music, books, and other recreational activities. They do a superb job of maximizing proWt for their shareholders but a dreadful job of providing the basis for a healthy democracy. Their entertainment fare is tailored to the needs of Madison Avenue; their journalism to the needs of the wealthy and powerful. By any known standard of liberal democracy, such a concentration of media power in a few self-interested Wrms run by some of the wealthiest people in the world poses an immediate and growing threat to our republic. As James Madison put it in 1822, “A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.” Far from regulating the media giants, the government has served as the handmaiden to these electronic robber barons. This oligopoly would never have passed legal muster if the regulators at the Federal Communications Commission and in the antitrust division of the Justice Department were doing their jobs, or if the Telecommunications Act of 1996 were not railroaded through Congress. The regulators have let these mergers slide, under tremendous pressure from the telecommunications and entertainment industry. Virtually no one in government is looking out for the public’s interest in the media Weld. Media concentration is not a new phenomenon, but it has accelerated dramatically in the last decade, and it is taking a new and dangerous form. Classically, media concentration was in the form of “horizontal integration,” where a handful of Wrms tried to control as much production in their particular Welds as possible. The U.S. Wlm production industry, for instance, has been a tight...

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