A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth, when civic discourse is grounded in verifiable fact. And with the decimation of reporting these sources of information are disappearing. The increasing fusion of news and entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the powerful, the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of the Internet and the ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the traditional news business are leaving us deaf, dumb and blind. The relentless assault on the “liberal press” by right-wing propaganda outlets such as Fox News or by the Christian right is in fact an assault on a system of information grounded in verifiable fact. And once this bedrock of civil discourse is eradicated, people will be free, as many already are, to believe whatever they want to believe, to pick and choose what facts or opinions suit their world and what do not. In this new world lies will become true.
Christopher Hedges, “Lies Become Truths.” Truthdig.
The casualties of the modern corporate state are many, but the deterioration of a truly free press is among the most consequential. As large, profit-driven corporations glean increasing market shares in the dissemination of knowledge, news coverage shifts appreciably in their favour—and public opinion follows.
“Public broadcasting and public knowledge are being slashed, which by default leaves knowledge production to the for-profit model, and the for-profit model is based on selling advertising space, or selling virtual goods,” remarks Bakan. “And if you’re selling advertising space, you’re selling to people who can afford it, and if they can afford it, they’re going to be the people who don’t want a lot of critical stuff in the vehicle where they’re placing their ads.”
“People aren’t stupid,” he says, “but they are dependent in terms of forming their views on the information that’s out there. And when you have such a coherent and narrow message being delivered by the mainstream media with no challenges at all, or challenges around the edges…that the state shouldn’t be involved [in the economy], austerity is the right approach…you can’t fault the people, the citizens, for kind of buying into that.”
Indeed, in the U.S., President Clinton also made his mark in deregulation of the Federal Communications Commission, which allowed for the transformation of the country’s news media apparatus into a narrow oligopoly, thrusting 90 per cent of the traditional U.S. mainstream media into the grip of six multinational corporations: Disney, ClearChannel, Viacom, General Electric, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and AOL/Time Warner. (For comparison’s sake, this market share was divided among 53 distinct enterprises in 1983.) All of these entities still perform credible reportage on news and current affairs, but cutbacks at foreign bureaus and investigative departments, along with corporate influence over editorial departments, have diminished the breadth and depth of news coverage these organizations are able to offer.
The situation in Canada is arguably even direr. At the time of this writing, a single corporation—Postmedia Network Inc.—controls newspapers in multiple major cities across the country, including National Post, the Vancouver Sun, the Vancouver Province, the Montreal Gazette, and the Ottawa Citizen. Canada’s other national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, makes the pretense of delivering balanced information, but neoliberal assumptions underlie much of its coverage of economic issues, including “free” trade agreements and austerity.
Canada still features an independent broadcaster in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, but cutbacks in recent years have forced the Crown corporation to downsize. Moreover, the public broadcaster has a tendency to seek multi-partisan “impartiality” and “objectivity” in its political coverage, and is typically conservative in its deference to extant institutions and the (neoliberal) capitalist economic system—conventions that sometimes work to the detriment of critical analysis. The organization also tends to reflect the relatively socially liberal and politically correct attitudes of the majority of Canadians, a predilection that galvanizes critics from the ideological right. One of the CBC’s self-proclaimed competitors, Sun Media—labeled “Fox News North” by its detractors—features commentators who still consider the public broadcaster an overly liberal institution, and are unsurprisingly keen to see its government funding eliminated.
Min Reyes—like Collis, an organizer of Occupy Vancouver—admits that she does not have the fondest memories of the manner in which the Canadian mainstream media sought to frame and represent the movement.
“The media was just brutal,” she chuckled. “I have to say that media played a huge role in bringing Occupy down…in demonizing Occupy, and making it irrelevant to the struggles of everyday people.”
More than a year after the occupation of the Vancouver Art Gallery courtyard in Vancouver dissolved under a provincial Supreme Court injunction, for Reyes, the wounds have had time to scar over. But the memories remain fresh.
“I think in the beginning, the media was trying to understand Occupy in the Canadian context…but you could kind of tell, with the people they picked, and the quotes they picked…they were selecting people that reflected what they already thought about Occupy, either personally or organizationally. And they viewed Occupy as a group of, well, kinda lazy people.”
Among the news commentary that stood out in Reyes’s mind, was an October 2011 piece by well known columnist Andrew Coyne, who attributed Canadian Occupiers’ motivations to “envy” rather than legitimate grievances.
The bulk of Canadian commentators and columnists, particularly those in English Canada, in Reyes’s view, are overly preoccupied with their own preconceived notions about protest movements. And in the case of Occupy, it was their failure to draw connections between the federal government’s misdemeanours and the protest movement that vexed her.
“When Occupy died down, when all these scandals started happening in government,” like the F-35 debacle and revelations about deceptive robocalls during the 2011 federal election, Reyes recounted, “some of these writers wrote articles where they asked ‘Where’s the outrage?’ And I’m like, ‘Hello? We’re outraged. Remember Occupy and all these issues?’”
“Oh, of course. You thought [Occupy] was just about us being, like, jealous of rich people.”