When we think of media control, our thought is of regimes begun in coups or revolutions, with power consolidated into a single dictator, whether a tiny oligarchic clique [a central committee] or a single individual, a demagogue or a generalissimo.
In Germany, Goebbels controlled the press, in the U.S.S.R., Stalin made all the major decisions, as with Franco in Spain and Mussolini [a former journalist] in Italy.
We argue that here, power is concentrated in a single individual, a person created not by biological evolution or a divine act, but by the insular oligarchy that is the Supreme Court.
The person in question is the corporation, literally the embodiment of venture and investment capital.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the corporation is something like Krishna revealed to Arjuna in the Mahabharata, revealing to him all the panoply of deities manifest in the Godhead of Vishnu.
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Just as Vishnu’s many manifestations but in reality, manifestations of a single being, so too behind the diversity of the multitudinous forms of the modern corporation is a single beast, the corporation— with individual companies the expressions of corporate being as manifested in particular circumstances to exploit particular sets of opportunities.
Just as manifestations [Rupas in Sankrit] of Vishnu fought each other, some dying, some thriving, so too individual corporations rise and fall.
And like immortal Vishnu, who had incarnated as Krishna, but unlike thee and we, the corporation is simultaneously, by judicial fiat, immortal and incarnate, and manifested in the Rupas of, ferrinstance, Ford, Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, CitiCorp, and Nike.
Just as it’s easy for a Hindu devotee to lose herself in one of the particular rupas of Vishnu, so too it’s easy to see a corporate as individually unique, forgetting that the same beast lurks in the heart of each one.
While gods demand a devotee’s attention and obedience, corporations demand our lives and livelihoods, in the forms of our labor and our wealth.
But while the gods promise our enlightenment and liberation, the corporation profits from our ignorance and our servitude.
And so we finally get to the media
Today’s media, the channels through which we communicate with each other, are owned by corporations, and serve as media themselves for messages created to ensure the greatest possible profits for the corporation. Indeed, the very shape of our own communication is shaped to ensure the greatest corporate profit. Always remember this: By law, the sole reason for the corporation’s existence is to ensure the flow of money to the pockets of its owners; all else is ancillary.
And the sad reality is that corporations control what we read and see. They have to; it’s their legal obligation to the shareholders.
Our own journalistic forte and passion, the long-form investigative work, is virtually dead, reserved for an ever-dwindling few, and confined to an ever-narrowing list of topics. The problem, you see, is that it’s damn expensive with a very high per-word-and-image price of production, and it draws so damn few readers/viewers/listeners.
The places where we were able to pursue our passion were incorporated, to be sure, but ownership was vested in either an individual or a family rather than an anonymous mass and fiduciary responsibility was tempered by a sense of moral and social responsibility to the communities served by their publications.
But such imperatives are anathema to the large shareholder-owned corporations, where profit is sovereign.
Here’s an excerpt from a Faster Times account by Oliver Wills, a modern media scribe who was delighted — with his masters degree in writing — to land a $35,000-a-year job turning out stories for AOL:
But this was part of the problem. We — by which I mean me and my fellow employees — were all so grateful. Which allowed us to ignore — or willfully overlook — certain problems. Such as the fact that AOL editors forced us to work relentless hours. Or the fact that we were paid to lie, actually instructed to lie by our bosses.
I was given eight to ten article assignments a night, writing about television shows that I had never seen before. AOL would send me short video clips, ranging from one-to-two minutes in length — clips from “Law & Order,” “Family Guy,” “Dancing With the Stars,” the Grammys, and so on and so forth… My job was then to write about them. But really, my job was to lie. My job was to write about random, out-of-context video clips, while pretending to the reader that I had watched the actual show in question. AOL knew I hadn’t watched the show. The rate at which they would send me clips and then expect articles about them made it impossible to watch all the shows — or to watch any of them, really.
That alone was unethical. But what happened next was painful. My “ideal” turn-around time to produce a column started at thirty-five minutes, then was gradually reduced to half an hour, then twenty-five minutes. Twenty-five minutes to research and write about a show I had never seen — and this twenty-five minute period included time for formatting the article in the AOL blogging system, and choosing and editing a photograph for the article. Errors were inevitably the result. But errors didn’t matter; or rather, they didn’t matter for my bosses.
What he describes is a 21st Century media sweatshop, an assembly line turning out high volume shoddy product. [Bet it’ll change under St. Arianna The Chameleon?]
One of AOL’s more deceptive practices is the art of headline writing. [One maxim: Include a Lady Gaga sans panties to pump up those page-view hits so attractive to advertisers.]
In other words, serve the corporation enslaving our attention.
The corporation knows all the latest research from the universities it’s buying up, research that’d cost us fifty bucks or so to view in their corporate–owned scientific journals [the subject of a future post now in progress]. Being primates, sex gets our attention. They have the numbers and the research to prove it.
The web, which we like to hail as an instrument of liberation, has become the perfect medium for corporate stalking, carefully tracking our attention and tailoring its message to strike us at our deepest, most instinctual numbers, refining and personalizing its messages to catch and capitalize on every momentary drift of our attention.
Unlike the embodied dictator, the corporate czar doesn’t sell a single message or a party line; instead, the corporation thrives on a diversity of opinion, while exploiting us through the common denominators that underlie them all.
And it’s not that corporations don’t care about politics. It’s just that they already own that game, so what we feel, our dreams, our fears matters not except as hooks to draw us in.
Challenging that power is the task that confronts us all.
Copyright troll spurned in court
That said, it is nice to see the corporation hit a roadblock now and then.
One disturbing trend has been the efforts of corporate media to capitalize on fair use of its offerings, often in the forms of costly lawsuits. One firm, Righthaven LLC, has become notorious for using the threat of litigation to intimidate and silence bloggers, seizing their blogs and reaching into their wallets.
It’s the same law firm engaged by MediaNews, the outfit that controls the largest share of newspaper circulation in California, and Stephens Media, which publishes my old employer, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, along with other papers.
They were handed a serious setback in federal court Tuesday in a decision handed down in a Las Vegas federal courtroom, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported on the day of the ruling:
In a decision with likely wide-ranging impact, a judge in Las Vegas today dismissed as a sham an infringement case filed by copyright troll Righthaven LLC. The judge ruled that Righthaven did not have the legal authorization to bring a copyright lawsuit against the political forum Democratic Underground, because it had never owned the copyright in the first place. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Fenwick & West LLP, and Las Vegas attorney Chad Bowers are defending Democratic Underground.
“We are pleased that the Court saw through Righthaven’s sham assignment of the copyright and dismissed its improper claim,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. “Today’s decision shows that Righthaven’s copyright litigation business model is fatally flawed, and we expect the decision to have wide effect on the over 270 other cases Righthaven has brought.”
Righthaven sued Democratic Underground last fall over an excerpt of a Las Vegas Review Journal news story that a user posted on the forum, claiming that the newspaper had transferred copyright to Righthaven before it filed the suit. However, a document unearthed in this litigation showed that the copyright assignment was a sham and that Righthaven was merely agreeing to undertake the newspaper’s case at its own expense in exchange for a cut of the recovery.
“In dismissing Righthaven’s claim in its entirety, Chief Judge Hunt’s ruling decisively rejected the Righthaven business model of conveying rights to sue, alone, as a means to enforce copyrights,” said Laurence Pulgram, head of copyright litigation at Fenwick & West in San Francisco. “The ruling speaks for itself. The court rejected Righthaven’s claim that it owned sufficient rights in the copyright, stating that claim was ‘flagrantly false–to the point that the claim is disingenuous if not outright deceitful.’”
Judge Hunt also noted that “Righthaven has made multiple inaccurate and likely dishonest statements to the Court” and rejected Righthaven’s efforts to fix things after the fact with a May 9, 2011, amendment to the original assignment agreement. The judge expressed “doubt that these seemingly cosmetic adjustments change the nature and practical effect” of the invalid assignment.
As part of his ruling today, the judge ordered Righthaven to show why it should not be sanctioned for misrepresentations to the court. The Court permitted Democratic Underground’s counterclaim to continue against Stephens Media — the publisher of the Review Journal — allowing Democratic Underground to show that it did nothing wrong in allowing a user to post a five-sentence excerpt of a 50-sentence article.
“This kind of copyright trolling from Righthaven and Stephens Media has undermined free and open discussion on the Internet, scaring people out of sharing information and discussing the news of the day,” said Opsahl. “We hope this is the beginning of the end of this shameful litigation campaign.”
“To Righthaven and Stephens Media, the Court has issued a stinging rebuke,” added Pulgram. “For those desiring to resist the bullying of claims brought by pseudo-claimants of copyright interests, the ruling today represents a dramatic and far reaching victory.”
The judge’s ruling is posted online here [PDF].
More on the case, including an extensive collection of court filings, is available here.
eats shoots 'n leaves 