Intro

On the Internet

David Barsamian
on Media and Corporate Power

[Sound advice for the interviewer, 23K]

Tell us a bit about yourself .

I've been involved in community broadcasting since 1978. I was born in New York City in 1945. My parents were survivors of the first genocide of the 20th century in Armenia in 1915. So I sort of grew up with that casting a very long shadow over me of devastation, dispersion and exile.

Did that have an affect on your choice of career?

It's influenced me in terms of being very skeptical and doubting, particularly of authority. The Armenians, much like the Jews in Germany, were very integrated into the Ottoman Turkish society. And starting in the 1890's and culmninating in 1915, with this organized state genocide, those that survived were disperesd to Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, and they and their descendants have found their way to North America.

Yeah, it had a big influence on me, because in the background was this holocaust from which my parents never really recovered. They never knew what hit them, they were semi-literate peasants and one day they were just uprooted.

To be skeptical is a very good criterion for any journalist, anyone doing political work. Just being inquisitive. Not to let that turn into cynicism. Cynicism is not healthy. It doesn't tell you very much about how and why a political system, or how the media function, for example.

Is there an attitude of cynicism in the media? Is that a problem?

For most people it's a job. I mean, they're trained to do journalism. They could be trained to sell cars.

Certainly one of the big inducements is access to power. Being privy to the high and mighty - this is very seductive. You're not just a journalist reporting a story, but you're the conduit though which power is conveying what it wants to the larger audience - the masses, the readership or the listeners. So that can be very heady stuff.

I never interview people in power, I feel they have nothing to say of value. People ask me that in the States; why don't you interview Henry Kissinger? There are five million inteviews with Henry Kissinger. Let me interview Maude Barlow, of the Council of Canadians, or David Orchard, or someone like that, and get a different persepective on things.

Don't you feel journalists can ask challenging questions of people in power?

They can ask challenging quesitons about specific policies. `Why, Mr Secretary, when you were in Djakarta, 1975, why did you and President Ford approve of the Indonesian attack on East Timor?' There's a question of policy. The questions that are never asked are the basic assumptions of power and privilege - `How do you legitimate what you're doing?'.

Noam Chomsky has talked about that tiny window in the media through which nothing deviant from the mainstream can be broadcast.

It can be broadcast but it makes no sense. Since there's no context to it, it sounds very esoteric and bizarre. For example, if I were to say, that Canada, during the war in Indochina, when almost four million people were killed during the 1960s and 1970s, Canada was the largest per capita war profiteer during that period. I would have to give some context, otherwise it woudl just -pfft! - fly right over peoples' ears.

Do you feel you can give that context on Alternative Radio?

Yeah, I think an hour allows for meaningful discussion. The detail that's required can be developed, or the context and historical background. So things are not taken in episodic segments, but rather are part of a larger quilt. Then people can understand how the world works, and why it works in certain ways.

Is that demanding too much of people?

It requires attention. And in a culture where attention is a commodity that can be bought and sold and packaged, people are reduced to listening for very short periods. And it's a talent that we need to recover. Because unless we have a larger picture, we won't really understand what's going on.

The major networks seem to believe that all we have the attention span for is the OJ Simpson trial.

That serves a different function, to distract and divert people so they can watch the latest sex trial, or rape, or incest, or whatever. That's infotainment. But it's very patronizing, because what they're saying is that people like you lack the intelligence to hear something of length.

You've described the American media landscape as being more grotesque than satire. Could you explain that?

The grotesqueness is in the propaganda. The propaganda is that the media is controlled by people like me, that there's a left-liberal cabal that's controlling the media, and that the media need to be more balanced. Now anyone who has a cursory knowledge of who the media are in the United States would collapse in paroxysms of laughter at this. But the U.S. is such an ideologically controlled country that people actualy take this as a serious critique. And then discuss it!. `Well they're not that left, there's William Buckley, for example.'

There's such a strangehold of right-wing ideology on the media, but the propaganda is just the opposite, and it's very hard to convince people that the media are in fact large corporations, whose interest in not just in promoting ideology but in making money. They're often parts of other large corporations. Like GE just doesn't own NBC, it also makes nuclear reactors. Electric power plants, toasters, radios, And these are part of even larger multinational conglomerates.

But most people in the media believe they're more able to think and act independently than the average person.

Well, that's one of great myths of the culture. By the time you become a journalist at the Globe and Mail, for example, you have gone through a whole series of indoctrinations. That's what education is about. Education is not just about learning to speak english, but it's about internalizing the values of the society. And as a student one learns very quickly what `works' - and what doesn't `work'. If you want to do something entirely different and be like Peter Wyntonyck and Mark Achbar and make a radical film about Noam Chomsky, then you make another decision about where you want to go. But by the time you get to be a journalist at the Globe and Mail, you actually believe the propaganda - your own propaganda - that you're independent and nobody tells you what to do. That's right; no one has to tell you what to do because you know what to do.

Your editor doesn't tell you `hey, if you do this you're fired'. It rarely gets to that point. Instead, there's an ambience in the room of shared ideology when there's a conference of the editors and journalists that's just a given. For example, it's just a given in Canada that too many people are exploting the social welfare system, and that's why Canada is becoming a poorer country. It's not because Canada's major corporations are relocating in Third World countries, or even the southern part of the US for that matter!

Our theme for Mediatribe this year is access - access to media institutions, technology, and education.

Let me just backtrack for a second and go back to education. Education is a system of imposed ignorance. Ralph Nader is a very admirable American, I truly respect him and his work, and he tells this wonderful story. Incidentally, he's an Arab-American, his parents came from Lebanon. Very few people know this in the United States.

Ralph grew up in a small town in Connecticut and his father ran a grocery store. One day, he comes homes and walk into the store. And then the father asks him "Well, Ralph, what did you learn in school today? Did you learn how to think, or did you learn how to believe?" And this just astonished Ralph Nader. And he went up in his room, completely flabbergasted. And he thought about this for a very long time. Then he understood: what you go to school for is to learn about beliefs. Consumerism, relations between men and women, between men and men, women and women, corporate power and individuals, employers and employees. So that's what a lot of education is about. It's not about challenging the basic structure of power and privilege!

There's a thesis that corporate media will eventually come around to addressing the concerns of marginalized groups since it's in their profitable interest. What do you think of this?

They'll only address those concerns if they can turn a profit on it. Their main concern is about making money, not addressing issues. If they can be convinced that the gay and lesbian community can provide huge advertising dollar, which is what they're all about, then sure, you'll get lots of coverage. The thing about the media is that they're totally hypocritical and opportunistic. But if it's something that's going to challenge their power and privilege then it's going to get a spin that's very very negative. Gays are out of control, are demanding too much, or will take away the rights of other people if they're given rights.

Why is there all this attention to crime? Street crime is a problem in the United States. Street crime in the United states last year was reported to be somewhere around half a billion dollars. But corporate crime is in the hundreds of billions - stock options, transfers. How do you measure that?

But these other types of crimes are never discussed at all, because then you'd learn the wrong lessons. The right lessons are that people of color out of control, especially blacks, that they're criminal genetically. And that we have to build more prisons, hire more cops. You stigmatize the most vulnerable sectors of the population - the poor, who have no media, who cannot articulate their concerns or desires and interests.

And that lack of a voice in the media affects the scope of debate. From a Canadian perspective of the health care debate in the US, for example, the range of opinion seems startlingly narrow.

The United States is a one-party state. It's like the old Soviet Union. The difference is like Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee. The Democrats are the party of business, the Republicans are the party of big business. There is some difference on social issues. Clinton may be pro-choice; most Republicans are not. But on eveything else, there's almnost an identical spin on everything.

The US desperately needs to become a more democratic society as we move into the 21st centruy, and all the trends are against that. It's becoming increasingly centralized, more totalitarian.

Totalitarian?

Corporations are structually totalitarian institutions. People don't know why decisions are made, none of the records are made public, meetings are in secret, all documents are classified. It's not like government committees for example, or Parliament, they have to publish reports of their deliberations. What's the record of the Seagram corporations' inner council? Does anyone know? Why did Seagram's last year acquire 15% of Time-Warner stock, one of the largest multimedia corporations in the world? What's their agenda? It's not just alcohol.

Corporate power is very secretive. For good reason. If people knew what they were doing - if Canadians knew that corporate managers were planning on moving their jobs to Mexico - they might not like that.

You mentioned once that you pay close attention to the business press for this reason.

The mass media are sports, and crime, and phenomena. Things happen! Random violence, society out of control... girl born with six heads. The business media, the stuff I read for example, Fortune, BusinessWeek, theFinanical Times, theGlobe and Mail, the Finanical Post, the Economist, this has a very different type of information. The corporate managers need precise information as to what's going on.

So those kinds of managers need to know what's going on in Mexico, or in Indonesia in terms of labor control and the facts that workers cannot get organized, there's a tremendous amount of government censorship, and the military essentially run everything. So if I want to open up a sneakers factory like Nike or Reebok I'd be very attracted to Indonesia where I can get workers for 14 cents an hour - in many cases young girls and children.

So there are levels of information, levels of propaganda. The business press has more levels of unvarnished information than the general press.

You also just said all the trends going are going against greater democracy. But many believe that new technologies such as email and electronic distribution are inherently more anarchic and less controllable.

I have a couple of thoughts on that. First of all, I'm concerned about the class bias of the new media. We're not talking about `the masses' here... we're talking about a certian group, in the United States overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly middle class and upper class people, who have acccess to computer technologies. Hey, kids in the ghetto, you know, who've dropped out of school, are not going to be online, faxing you information.

The other thing is, while I recognize it to be a new form of communication, I really like meeting people. In person. [On computers and intimacy, 133 K sound]

However, there's a tremendous corporate interest in controlling [the Internet]. We cannot turn that into yet another megaphone for the corporate power and ideology.

Do you have any advice for people like students who are just entering the media, on not becoming, as you call them, "corporate flacks and lackeys"?

You know the slogan about think globally, act locally. I'm a big proponent of that. Although first I acted locally and then I went globally!

What can you do in your community? What makes sense in your neighbourhood? How can you organize around certain issues? Whether it's a school board issue, or a transportation issue, something that connects with other people. I think people are feeling, very much, in the so-called developed societies, is this atomization, this incredible separation.

And not trying to reach hundreds of thousands of people at once. Start with your neighbour. Most people don't know who their neighbour is. That's a very shocking situation. And there might be more concern in Canada for East Timor, as there should be, but there also should be concern for what's happening in Saskatchewan and Alberta.

So being national, being international, but also being local, finding something that's appropriate for your talent, finding something that it is appropriate for your interest.

And it takes courage, it takes dedication. But I think the rewards are substantial -- not financial rewards, but the emotional rewards in finding something that's meaningful.

"Alternative Radio" can be heard in the Montreal region on CKUT 90.3 FM's "Gray Matters", Thursdays from 7-8 pm.