The importance of a sound media diet

Matt McCann, the Aquinian (St. Thomas University)

FREDERICTON (CUP) — Embodied in the first amendment rights of the American constitution, and the freedom of the press stipulations in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, is the idea that a free press is the cornerstone of a healthy democracy.

Oct. 18 is the sixth anniversary of Media Democracy Day. It is a day to remember the institution whose presence gives us, the citizens with whom power ultimately lies, the information to make informed decisions about our elected officials, and to hold them accountable for their actions.

This includes the dominant institutions of government and business.

The fourth estate is, however, reaching a crisis point. Media sources are becoming concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, resulting in a narrowing of the scope of opinion and perspective. Discussion on matters of public importance is effectively limited to those with the money and power to project their voice.

According to Kalle Lassen, founder of Adbusters magazine, “four corporations distribute 70 per cent of our nation’s daily newspaper circulation, three corporations control most of our televised news market and one company owns the majority of our radio stations.”

The media landscape is now dominated by corporate conglomerates such as Disney, General Electric, Time Warner AOL and CanWest. Public discourse in North America is largely shaped by these organizations.

The Media Democracy Day website (mediademocracyday.org) puts the situation in perspective.

“You can switch from CNN to HBO to the Cartoon network,” it explains, “read from Time Magazine and Sports Illustrated, watch a movie, and even attend a baseball game — and never leave the domain of AOL Time Warner.”

In New Brunswick alone, most of the daily and weekly newspapers are owned by the Irving family. Though the Irving-owned papers do express differing opinions on some issues, the real problem, discussed at length in Noam Chomsky’s CBC Massey Lecture Necessary Illusions, is the scope of the debate.

Atlantica, for instance, is a new free trade zone encompassing the ideas of Maritime Union and north-south trade with the US. It is an important public policy issue for New Brunswickers that will have far-reaching social and economic effects.

Little Maritime media attention (the issue is almost unheard of outside of the East coast) is concerned with a serious comparison of the benefits and drawbacks of the proposal. Instead, debate centers on the legal minutiae of implementation, and who will benefit more.

Media consolidation is a business and as a business journalism begins to function more in the interest of the marketplace than for the public that consumes it.

A profit driven media is concerned only with what will sell. The private lives of celebrities, sensationalist news stories or contrived events are splashed across the front page instead of important public issues.

How many citizens can speak about the pros and cons of Atlantica against the recent developments in the Spears’ custody battle?

The end result, according to Canadians for a Democratic Media, a public interest watch group, is that journalism becomes “more integrated into the profit-making imperatives of trans-national conglomerates, [more] driven by marketing and commercial pressures rather than an ethic of public service, [and] shaped by the corporate agenda.”

Nowhere is this more evident than the issue of net neutrality. The Internet has become an invaluable tool for the dissemination of information and its importance grows almost daily as more of the world is digitized. Most news organizations offer as much content online as they do in the physical world, and often more.

The New York Times even recently explored options to become an online-only format. Magazines such as Slate and the Tyee have never published a hard copy.

Today, North American Internet service providers (ISPs) have little to no control over the content that we access. Net neutrality laws prohibit ISPs from discriminating (slow service, blocked sites, etc.) based on information contained in the site.

Lobby groups, however, are fighting to change these laws. Advocating to subject the Internet to market forces, ISPs could conceivably block access to competitors or sites expressing unwelcome opinions.

Such clampdowns are not unheard of and are commonplace activity in states such as China and Burma.

“Increasingly,” wrote Neil Barratt in the Canadian Journal of Communications, “broadband Internet access is a basic need for our participation in social life, both as citizens and consumers.”

Indeed, the Internet could be the saving grace of media democracy through its ease of access and use. One initiative, applauded by Barratt and others, is the increasingly common provision of free wireless Internet service in the downtown areas of major cities.

The development of podcasts such as Democracy Now! (www.democracynow.org), a daily radio broadcast that also streams live audio and video daily, has also presented new information consumption opportunities.

In the end though, the responsibility lies with us as citizens to undertake what Chomsky has classified as “a regimen of intellectual self-defense.”

For, as Canadians for a Democratic Media so eloquently tell us, “without an informed and engaged citizenry, policy issues become defined by political and corporate elites.”