Text 2773, 72 rader
Skriven 2004-09-30 05:13:28 av Stephen Hayes (5:7106/20.0)
Ärende: Globalisation and the media
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* Original dated: Tue Sep 28, 10:37

From: family.media_watch@family-bbs.net (Media Watch)
From: "Steve Hayes" <khanyab@lantic.net>

Australia's samidzat

By John Pilger

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2004/600/600p16.htm

In 1983, the principal media in the Western world, which dominate much of the
media in the rest of the world, were owned by 50 corporations. In 2002, this
had fallen to nine transnational companies. Rampant deregulation has ended even
a semblance of diversity.

In February this year, Rupert Murdoch predicted that, within three years, there
would be just three global media corporations and his company would be one of
them. He may have exaggerated, but not by much. Consider the situation in
Australia, where Murdoch controls 70% of the capital city press, including the
only newspapers serving Adelaide and Brisbane. (In Adelaide, he controls all
the printing presses.)

On the Internet, the leading 20 websites are now owned by the likes of Fox
(Murdoch), Disney, AOL Time Warner, Viacom and a clutch of other giants; just
14 companies attract 60% of all the time Americans spend online. The owners of
these vast enterprises make no secret of their global ambition: to produce not
informed, free-thinking citizens, but obedient customers and to reinforce the
rapacious ideology of neoliberalism.

Never, in my experience, has free journalism been as vulnerable to subversion
on a grand, often unrecognisable scale. Giant public relations companies,
employed by the state and other vested interests, now account for much of the
editorial content of the media, however insidious their methods and indirect
their message. This is another kind of embedding, known in military circles as
information dominance, which in turn is part of full spectrum dominance. The
objective is the merging of information control and the nominally free media.

How do we react to this? My own view is that the immediate future lies with the
emerging samidzat, the word for the unofficial media during the late Soviet
period. Given the current technology, the potential is huge. On the worldwide
web, the best alternative websites are already read by an audience of millions.
The courageous reporting of a new breed of citizen reporters from besieged Iraq
has provided an antidote to the embedded coverage of the official media. In the
United States, independent newspapers flourish alongside popular independent
community-based radio stations, such as Pacifica and Amy Goodman's Democracy
Now.

In Australia, against the odds, the samidzat is growing, and I would say its
model is Green Left Weekly (http://www.greenleft.org.au), which is produced and
published by volunteers and provides a wider coverage of the other world a
world that often does not exist in the so-called mainstream  than any newspaper
with resources of which GLW has not even a fraction.

Those of us who report this other world  actually the majority of humanity know
that true internationalism has returned and that public opinion has been
aroused in so many countries, perhaps as never before. People have the right
for their voices to be heard, and those who provide the means deserve all our
support.

[John Pilger's new book, Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its
Triumphs, is published in Australia in November by Random House.]

 From Green Left Weekly, September 29, 2004.

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