Media and change: Expecting the impossible

THE MOST powerful organizations in the world are not governments but corporations, and among the most powerful corporations are the global media conglomerates. Corporations are the power behind even the most powerful governments, whose policies they shape through their influence over the men and women they help elect or otherwise put in power. Their current mantra may be government non-interference and their god the free market. But they nevertheless demand and get tax-payer bailouts when they need them, and expect the  governments they put in power to craft and implement business-friendly policies. They are seldom disappointed.

But the global media conglomerates have twice the power of other transnationals. Not only do they help shape (and echo) the policies of governments, they also have the power to shape the consciousness of billions all over the planet through their information and entertainment functions.

The communication scholar Ben Bagdikian (The Media Monopoly) notes that this power is currently concentrated in the hands of five global media giants. As of 2012 the Walt Disney Company was the largest media conglomerate, with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, Time-Warner, the CBS Corporation and Viacom completing the top five list. All should be familiar to Philippine news and entertainment audiences who are regularly deluged by their reports, music and video cds, movies and TV series.

Because Philippine television airs and otherwise uses these and other Western-based media companies’ reports on events from all over the globe as well as their entertainment offerings, much of the information about the rest of the planet, the values and ideas implicit in the way the information is framed, and even more directly, the premises of the movies and TV series that reach Philippine audiences, reflect a view of the world drawn from the cultural assumptions and biases of their makers. Is this true only of cable TV? A scan of the offerings of Philippine free television reveals a mix of locally-produced and foreign-sourced programs. In a number of cases, local versions of foreign franchises are also in evidence. The news programs over free TV, on the other hand, also source most of their news reports on other countries from the same media giants their counterparts in cable use.

The uncritical acceptance of the perspectives implicit in the way the information disseminated daily to millions of Filipinos, and of the values embedded in the police stories, game shows, situation comedies, “reality” shows, and horror and fantasy tales that every season are inflicted by the media giants’ entertainment programs on billions all over the world, creates a view of the human environments—whether social, political, or natural—supportive of an agenda hostile to change.

The programming of the media giants have encouraged this antagonism to change among the media audiences in the Philippines, a country with a desperate need for transformation, and where the capacity of the media to promote change could be a crucial factor in the realization of the centuries’ old aspirations for prosperity, peace, and progress—or in merely achieving some success in such modest aims as ending public sector corruption, putting a stop to human rights violations, or reforming the Philippine police.

That no significant change in any of these limited but nevertheless crucial areas of immediate public interest has occurred is at least partly due to the dominant (“mainstream”) media’s focus on the very same concerns and perspectives as their counterparts in the giant media conglomerates and their consequently rare attention to, and superficial treatment of, “serious” issues.

It’s an emphasis determined by the examples of the Philippine media’s presumed betters in the global media establishment, as well as by the pre-eminence of private commercial interest over public interest in the media, which in turn demands at least silent acquiescence, if not collaboration, with the political system and the politicians who run it. It explains why, during  such periods of crisis as foreign invasions and the declaration of martial law, the corporate media have either been vulnerable to political pressures, and have readily capitulated to tyranny. Of even more relevance, it explains why the dominant media are unable to address the urgent demands for change in Philippine society. To expect the media to change for the sake of change is to expect the impossible.