Corporatism Watch

Corporatism, more accurately described as corporate statism, has taken hold in the United States.  It is inherently anti-democratic, concentrating power in the control of a political-economic elite.   21st century corporatism seems to be evolving differently than its predecessors in that it seeks to organize society not for the general welfare and betterment of society but to entrench the advantage of the privileged.

Keith Olbermann's abrupt consignment into obscurity has some of us mystified.  AlterNet suggests if you want to know what happened to Olbermann, you should ask GE, General Electric, the corporate owner of MSNBC.   It contends that KO was just too progressive for the corporatist media:

Now, with Olbermann’s permanent departure on Friday, the remainder of MSNBC’s liberal evening line-up, which also includes Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and Lawrence O’Donnell (who will fill Olbermann’s 8 p.m. slot), must face the reality that any sustained friction with management could mean the bum’s rush for them, too.

The liberal hosts also must remember that MSNBC experimented with liberal-oriented programming only after all other programming strategies, including trying to out-Fox Fox, had failed – and only after it became clear that President George W. Bush’s popularity was slipping.

Media corporatism, of the variety now comfortably blanketing Canada's news outlets, is a vehicle of corporatist statism.   Media, concentrated in the hands of but a few interests, is in a position to benefit in many ways by placing itself at the service of compatible political interests.  There are subsidies to be had, regulations to be rewritten or scrapped entirely, all for promoting a partisan point of view to an often unwary public.   The political beneficiary of this kindness need dispense nothing but the public interest in an independent, vibrant mass media.

What is beginning to happen in Canada is old hat in the US.  Corporatist statism there has advanced by leaps and bounds ahead of its Canadian adherents.   The forces of corporatism there not only have their "bought and paid for" Congress in their service but also the Supreme Court itself.  The Citizens United decision in which the US Supreme Court invested corporations with political rights, ignoring the fact that corporate personality is a simple legal fiction, was the hallmark of the judicial branch's conversion to corporatist statism.  Last week the progressive state of Vermont moved a resolution to reverse this decision, hoping it will lead to a groundswell of anti-corporatist outrage elsewhere, but we'll have a good wait before we see if that defies the odds to succeed.

Corporatist statism was manifest in the Bush/Cheney years.   Imagine a government waging two, enormously expensive wars on money borrowed from foreign lenders also enacting tax cuts for the rich likewise funded by money borrowed from foreign lenders.  It suffered a blow with the election of Obama and the Democratic capture of both houses of Congress but, aided by the corporatist media, the Republicans were quick to retake the House.

America stands as a warning of the perils of media corporatism and what it holds for Canada.    We witnessed the sharp turn to the right in the Globe & Mail when it fell to Bell Globemedia.  We saw the rise and fall of the blatantly partisan CanWest.  Sun Media needs no elaboration.   Now, in the West, we have the emergence of the new media monolith, Shaw Communications.

From a lowly cable TV company, Shaw has rapidly branched out into a regional, internet service provider and a telephone service provider.   Recently it acquired the broadcast interests of CanWest, that now adds to its corporate structure the elements of broadcaster and TV content provider.  It appears Shaw next intends to get into the cellular phone business.   Have we unleashed a potential monster?   Is this expansion truly in the public interest?

This is the very sort of problem I once would have expected the Liberal Party to address.   I keep waiting to hear today's Liberals speak out on the entrenchment of concentration of media ownership and media cross ownership in Canada.   I wait forlornly for Liberal advocacy for the restoration of independent, robust and vibrant media in Canada.   Yet all I hear is silence.

America's Media - Still Cheney's Lapdog

The past six years have been perhaps the darkest in the history of American journalism. Time and again the networks and print jockeys have fallen on bended knee, opened wide and swallowed whatever incredulous bucket of swill was chucked their way. Some have been gullible, some stupid, some cowed into unquestioning servitude, some have just been well-rewarded collaborators.

There was reason to hope that, after the Iraq WMD scam, the American media would find their feet again and stand up. Forget it.

Historian and US national security policy analyst Gareth Porter, writing for Inter Press Service, reveals how the media were all too willing dupes for a planted story about Iranian threats in the Persian Gulf:

Senior Pentagon officials, evidently reflecting a broader administration policy decision, used an off-the-record Pentagon briefing to turn the January 6 US-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz into a sensational story demonstrating Iran's military aggressiveness, a reconstruction of the events following the incident shows.

The initial press stories on the incident, all of which can be traced to a briefing by deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in charge of media operations, Bryan Whitman, contained similar information that has since been repudiated by the navy itself.

Then the navy disseminated a short video into which was spliced the audio of a phone call warning that US warships would "explode" in "a few seconds". Although it was ostensibly a navy production, Inter Press Service (IPS) has learned that the ultimate decision on its content was made by top officials of the Defense Department.

The encounter between five small and apparently unarmed speedboats, each carrying a crew of two to four men, and the three US warships occurred very early on Saturday January 6, Washington time. No information was released to the public about the incident for more than 24 hours, indicating that it was not viewed initially as being very urgent.

The reason for that absence of public information on the incident for more than a full day is that it was not that different from many others in the Gulf over more than a decade. A Pentagon consultant who asked not to be identified told IPS he had spoken with officers who had experienced similar encounters with small Iranian boats throughout the 1990s, and that such incidents are "just not a major threat to the US Navy by any stretch of the imagination."

By January 11, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell was already disavowing the story that Whitman had been instrumental in creating only four days earlier. "No one in the military has said that the transmission emanated from those boats," said Morrell.

The other elements of the story given to Pentagon correspondents were also discredited. The commanding officer of the guided missile cruiser Port Royal, Captain David Adler, dismissed the Pentagon's story that he had felt threatened by the dropping of white boxes in the water. Meeting with reporters on Monday, Adler said, "I saw them float by. They didn't look threatening to me."

The naval commanders seemed most determined, however, to scotch the idea that they had been close to firing on the Iranians. Cosgriff, the commander of the Fifth Fleet, denied the story in a press briefing on January 7. A week later, Commander Jeffery James, commander of the destroyer Hopper, told reporters that the Iranians had moved away "before we got to the point where we needed to open fire".

By any measure it's not sage these days to take much of what comes out of the American media, or their like-minded allies here in Canada, at face value. They've simply allowed themselves - whether out of fear or gullibility, coercion or reward - to become full-fledged partners in a massive and powerful propaganda machine.