What Media in Whose Interest?

by Alan MacLeod,* Scottland

(6 December 2022) I’m an investigative journalist for Palestinian-American news outlet “MintPress News”. I have also been published or quoted in many of the most well-known English-language media outlets. Before that, I was an academic specializing in media and journalism studies.

And so, for more than a decade now, I have been closely monitoring the media, its agenda, and how it works, both from afar and from the eye of the storm.

And my take home message that I want to get across today is that the media is not your friend. For the most part, journalists are not plucky truth tellers standing up to power, but small cogs in enormous, multibillion-euro machines that have their own agendas. The media rarely challenges power; they are power, the voice of the powerful. And their role is to shape public opinion in a way that advances the interests of their billionaire owners and advertisers.

We in the West like to think we have a pluralistic society where all points of view are aired, and that “propaganda” mostly exists in authoritarian states like the USSR or North Korea. We also like to warn of the dangers of state media. But in reality, we live in a corporate captured state, and so corporate media is state media by default.

Media companies vs. diversity of opinion

There is little diversity of opinion on offer at our newsstands or on our televisions. In Great Britain, where I live, just three corporations – News UK (owned by Rupert Murdoch), DMGT and Trinity Mirror – control over 70% of newspaper circulation. In Finland, the four largest TV operators reach 92% of viewers and take home 97% of the profits.

Even in Switzerland, where linguistic differences help maintain a diversity of titles, TX Group, owners of 20 Minutes, 24 Heures and the Berner Zeitung, among others, controls around half of the market.

In 2018, The European Commission published a report noting that concentration of media ownership is one of the biggest challenges to diversity of information and viewpoints in Europe.

But these corporations do not stop simply at owning media. As the esteemed Indian journalist, Palagummi Sainath, noted,

“Large media companies are big players in fields ranging from agriculture to aviation, from sugar to stock markets, from finance to fashion, from management to mining. It is very hard to tell the difference these days between fourth estate and real estate.

Plus, there are the extremely complex interlocking directorships ownerships that see many top corporate leaders sitting on the boards of media. The point is this: the media are not pro-corporate, the media are not pro-business, the media are not pro-establishment, they are the establishment. They are the cutting-edge ideological arm of it.”

These gigantic corporations impose strict ideological control over all their employees. For example, Germany-based media company Axel Springer – controlling more than 150 titles and employing over 15,000 people worldwide – forces its employees to pledge allegiance to the European Union, to free market, neoliberal capitalism and to support the government of Israel. In fact, it has recently gone on a firing spree, purging many Muslim or Arab workers who expressed opposition to Israel’s latest attack on Gaza.

Meanwhile, all 175 newspapers that Rupert Murdoch owned in 2003 came out to support the deeply controversial US/UK invasion of Iraq.

Another media oligarch, Conrad Black, was explicit in the sort of total control he exerts over his staff. He said: “If editors disagree with us, they should disagree with us when they’re no longer in our employ. The buck stops with ownership. I am responsible for meeting payroll. Therefore, I will determine what the papers say”.

Creating an ideological hegemony

In short then, the purpose of corporate media in our society is to help create an ideological hegemony, in the words of radical Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, where the interests and outlooks of the elite become seen as common sense, normal, or the default. Fifty years later, American scholars Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky described this process as artificially “manufacturing consent” among the population as a whole.

The concentration of ownership of our media has real world consequences. Italian politician Silvio Berlusconi, the major shareholder in Italy’s biggest private TV company, its biggest publisher and its largest advertising company, was able to use his media empire to become prime minister and keep himself in power.

Dramatic collapse in previous media

What has become clear to all – even those with only a passing interest in the media – is that we are living through the slow death of the old system and the birth of a new one. Media is in crisis; there has been a dramatic collapse in print sales across Europe. Today, only 5% of Norwegians and 3% of Irish, Spanish and Italians say print media is their go-to source, with online media surging.

TV is going the same way. In 2016, 69% of Swiss people used TV as a primary news source. Today, that number has fallen to 57%. In Spain, it has dropped from 72% to 59% over the same period. And in Poland, it has decreased from 81% to 59%.

Many have cheered this decline, saying ‘good riddance’. Distrust in media as an institution is at an all-time high across Europe. According to the Reuters Digital Media Institute latest yearly report, most Europeans are actively hostile towards their own media. Only 26% of Slovaks, 27% of Greeks, 29% of French, 32% of Spaniards and 35% of Italians have any trust in the media whatsoever. (That number in Switzerland, for anyone interested, is 46%).

Meanwhile, only a pitiful 7% of Greeks, and 13% of Italians and Spaniards say their media is free from undue political influence. The best case the study found was in Finland, where only 50% of people were confident that the press wasn’t politically controlled.

In short, old media has a huge and justified credibility crisis.

Democratization through the internet? Regrettably, no.

In the 1990s and 2000s, there was a great deal of hope among sociologists and media studies academics that the Internet would be a liberating force – a peer-to-peer network that would democratize the information system and usher in a new golden age of communication.

However, not only has that not happened, but the levels of concentration of ownership and censorship online are arguably even worse than in old media. Giant monopolies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook dominate the internet.

Nearly 3 billion people use Facebook regularly, giving the company enormous power to promote or suppress messages and ideas globally. Through its newsfeeds and algorithms, Facebook has become by far the largest single medium of communication in human history. Before the internet, there was never a news distributor with even 5% of Facebook’s reach.

Meanwhile, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos became the richest man in the world, and used his wealth to buy The Washington Post newspaper, turning it into a vehicle for his own business interests.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is also an important media baron. We rely on Microsoft for social media like LinkedIn, hardware like Microsoft Surfaces and the Windows Phone, software like Microsoft OS. And the “MS” in MSNBC stands for “Microsoft.” In addition, my investigation found that Gates has given at least $319 million to media outlets worldwide, including millions to Der Spiegel (Germany), El País (Spain), Le Monde (France) and the Guardian (UK). In return, these outlets turn a blind eye to his dealings and give him positive press.

60% of Europeans have used Facebook for news or communication in the past week; 51% have used WhatsApp, and 40% Instagram, all of whom are owned by one company. These sorts of huge monopolies give online giants incredible power to influence public opinion. And they are using it for just that purpose.

An incredible power to influence public opinion

A recent study of Twitter, for instance, showed that the company’s algorithm promoted right-wing politicians over left-wing ones in many European countries, including France, Spain and the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that he intentionally throttles traffic to left-wing news sites on his platform, explicitly because of their political outlook.

Discouraging ideas that challenge the system they benefit from is a key tactic of social media giants. Google, for instance, has constantly attacked alternative media websites, de-ranking, demoting and delisting them from search results. MintPress News, the company I work for, has lost nearly 90% of its Google search traffic since 2016, and other alternative news sites have suffered similar, irreparable losses. This catastrophic decline has led to the closing of countless alternative news websites.

Google and Facebook control the content

Google and Facebook also control online advertising and regularly remove all advertisements from political content they disagree with, further throttling debate. This is not just done to racist or hateful content, but to views critical of war, inequality, capitalism or corporate power. An example of this is my investigation into Bill Gates’ funding of media companies worldwide. The article went viral and was read by hundreds of thousands of people. Yet because Google pulled advertisements from it, deeming it a “controversial” topic, we actually lost money running it. This is just one more way that media outlets are discouraged from scrutinizing the powerful.

Networking between social media platforms and the US security apparatus

Added to this is the worrying closeness between the biggest social media platforms and the US national security state. Over the past 3 years, Facebook, TikTok, Google and Twitter have collectively hired literally hundreds of officials from the CIA, NSA, FBI, NATO and other Western agencies. Worse still, these individuals rarely work in politically neutral fields, but rather are centered around trust and safety, security and content moderation. For example, Aaron Berman, the person who is ultimately in charge of Facebook’s biggest content moderation decisions – deciding what we all see and don’t see online – was, until 2019, one of the highest ranking members of the CIA.

Journalism is in a state of crisis, with journalists themselves more pessimistic about their industry’s future than any other occupation. Yet it is still a highly competitive industry, with the route into it often necessitating long internships, meaning that the profession is effectively cut off to many but the richest applicants who can support themselves for 6 months or a year without income. As a result, journalists increasingly come from elite backgrounds and are more likely to see those trying to change the system as threats needing to be opposed and countered.

Overall picture of journalism is worrisome

The long hours and precarious working conditions do not lend themselves to independent thinkers. Only those who please their bosses will obtain that elusive permanent contract. Most news outlets are downsizing, rather than hiring, adding a further pressure on staff to follow orders from above.

Added to this is the fact that, with the rise of the internet, journalists are expected to produce more content with fewer resources than ever, leading to high rates of overwork, fatigue and burnout. As such, the system selects for deference and obedience, rather than creativity, with those rocking the boat weeded out at an early stage. As a result, the professional journalism industry has become one of the most conformist of all.

Of course, there are many notable and noble exceptions to this trend, some of whom are at this conference. But the big picture is a worrying one.

The important thing is to develop critical media competence

Why this is important is because the media hold enormous power in society, whether they acknowledge it or not. As the Armenian-American journalist and university professor Ben Bagdikian wrote, the mass media are “The authority at any given moment for what is true and what is false, what is reality and what is fantasy, what is important and what is trivial. There is no greater force in shaping the public mind.”

Malcolm X summed it up in another way: "If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."

Media is all too often used to help start wars. Before they send in the troops, they send in the journalists. But if we had a more representative, democratic media, they could be used to end them. And that is something everyone here should be working towards.

And that is why it is so crucial to analytically scrutinize everything you read and develop a critical media literacy. And I very much hope that this conference this weekend will contribute to that goal for all of us.

Thank you.

* Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer and Podcast Producer at „MintPressNews“. "I mostly tweet about US and Latin American politics but complaining about corporate media is my passion“.