Media in the Business of Manufacturing Consent-II

Let us first understand the compulsions of the media houses behind promoting certain kinds of news to certain class of people. Almost all media that reach a large audience across the world are owned by for-profit corporations. These corporations, obviously put the profits of their investors ahead of all other considerations. The goal of maximizing profits is often in conflict with the practice of responsible journalism. The companies which own most of the the media are becoming larger and fewer in number as the biggest ones absorb their rivals. This concentration of ownership tends to reduce the diversity of media voices. As news outlets fall into the hands of large conglomerates with holdings in many industries, conflicts of interest inevitably interfere with newsgathering.

In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. Today, only 5 huge corporations -- Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) -- control most of the media industry in the U.S.

What attracts the advertisers towards the media? Let us understand what Noam Chomsky has to very fittingly say about this:

[T]he New York Times [is] a corporation and sells a product. The product is audiences. They don’t make money when you buy the newspaper. They are happy to put it on the worldwide web for free. They actually lose money when you buy the newspaper. But the audience is the product. … You have to sell a product to a market, and the market is, of course, advertisers (that is, other businesses). Whether it is television or newspapers, or whatever, they are selling audiences. Corporations sell audiences to other corporations.
— Noam Chomsky, What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream, Z Magazine, June 1997.

As mentioned in my previous blog, this is precisely how the media houses cater to the advertisers. When the advertising forms such a strong revenue stream, it starts influencing the the editors in selecting the articles which suit the products advertised. Let us now see what Ben H. Bagdikian has to say:

The influence of advertising on magazines reached a point where editors began selecting articles not only on the basis of their expected interest for readers but for their influence on advertisements. Serious articles were not always the best support for ads. An article that put the reader in an analytical frame of mind did not encourage the reader to take seriously an ad that depended on fantasy or promoted a trivial product. An article on genuine social suffering might interrupt the “buying” mood on which most ads for luxuries depend. The next step, seen often in mid-twentieth century magazines, was commissioning articles solely to attract readers who were good prospects to buy products advertised in the magazine. After that came the magazine phenomenon of the 1970s — creating magazines for an identifiable special audience and selling them to particular advertisers.
— Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, Sixth Edition, (Beacon Press, 2000), p.138.

Having understood the compulsions & the rationale` behind media's interests in catering to certain classes, let us, in the next blog see how media manufactures consent.