Re: Financing of media.

[Trond Andresen <Trond.Andresen@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I said in my last message

> >...advertising-dependent media impairs the function
> >of society's "collective brain" in the same way that drugs do for an
> >individual.
> >
to which Herb replied

> ... I still don't believe it.
> Actually, I used to have debates with John Kenneth Galbraith over this
> issue--he is a big fan of this position. He argues that where there is
> a lot of advertizing, people opt for _private_ as opposed to _public_
> consumption.

I am NOT primarily interested in the direct impact of advertising on the
public, i.e. that it promotes unneccessary private consumption. My main
concern is the indirect impact on programming policy and the _contents_
of programs.  Commercial media's influence on the choice between
private or public consumption is to me just a piece of the much bigger
problem of society's capacity to distribute and process important
information, "important" in the sense of taking care of the
environment and the lives of most people.

> ... consumption is the only thing capitalism really
> gives people (as opposed to meaningful work and communities, etc.),
> and we shouldn't critique capitalism for 'delivering the goods' in
> this area (this was also a mistake of Herbert Marcuse, IMO).

Let us just for discussion's sake say that the balance between private
and public consumption in the U.S. is OK. But still commercial media
have the following characteristics.

A bias in favour of business interests in choices on

1) which topics to cover, and

2) how to cover them.

A local example: In my city we have the well-known problem of
increasing car congestion and pollution in the city centre.  But the
retailers there do not want restrictions on car traffic, because they
are afraid of reduced sales. A publicly-financed radio can cover this
topic from an environmental and health angle, a commercial radio would
tend to choose the angle: "Why won't the municipality increase
accessibility by more parking space and increased road capacity". I am
not saying that the will always do it like this, but I am saying that
they have a systematic bias in this direction.

A bias in hiring and promoting journalists with an outlook that
unbridled capitalism is the only alternative. If they do not have that
outlook at the outset, they will acquire it gradually, because of the
general atmosphere in commercial media. Quite unconsciously (I am not
suggesting that they are cynical propagandists) they will mostly choose
not to focus on questions involving fundamental criticism of the
system, and the presentation of alternatives. Instead they will - again
unwittingly - choose to give the most coverage to sports, accidents,
crime, entertainment, celebrities. Wars, poverty and social tragedies
are of course covered, but mainly from a charity, curiosity or or even
an entertainment angle. And because of the competition between
journalists in commercial media, we will have the important mechanism
of self-censorship. And no other profession is so good in lying to
themselves that they are doing an honest job, as journalists (except
people working in advertising, that is).

Commercial media will also tend to choose entertainment to the
exclusion of informative programs and focusing on problems, not only
because of attitudes among editors/journalists but also in the rat race
to win listeners/viewers/readers. Because a large part of the public do
not want to be bothered with problems or information that demands use of
the brain. To use my analogy between a sick society and a sick
individual, entertainment-biased programming/editorial policy in
today's world can be compared to taking drugs to forget serious health
problems instead of doing something about them.

Commercial media's objective is to earn money. Only to the extent that a
side-effect of this objective is that they take good care of society's
real needs for information and information processing, can such media be said
to function well in my sense.

Norway during the 80s has been a great experiment to study these
problems, since we went from a purely public service broadcasting
situation (1982) to today's mix of public service and commercial
stations, local and national (and satellite, of course). IMO the data
from this "laboratory" confirms my views. Norway's collective brain and
capacity for clear thinking is today additionaly impaired by the (to
our country) new drug of commercial broadcasting.

Trond

 ----------------------------------------------
| Trond Andresen (Trond.Andresen@xxxxxxxxxxx) |
| Department of Engineering Cybernetics       |
| The Norwegian Institute of Technology       |
| N-7034 Trondheim, NORWAY                    |
|                                             |
| phone (work)  +47 73 59 43 58               |
| fax   (work)  +47 73 59 43 99               |
| private phone +47 73 53 08 23               |
-----------------------------------------------