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By Root 744 0

is increasingly frustrated by the material conditions of late capitalism, which create a monopoly of information providers. The more media is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer owners, the easier it is to control and manipulate the language that is used to describe and evaluate political reality. Since there are fewer owners of media outlets, pundits and politicians are more easily able to frame political reality in ways that favor their view, while excluding real criticism. By extension, mainstream viewers and voters are less able to think critically about the status quo and, more importantly, to think beyond it. In the last twenty years, globalization has strengthened this monopoly on information and, by extension, on American political dialogue.

The majority of media sources are currently corporate-owned. The concentration and accumulation of capital in larger firms has been deleterious to competition among different media sources.121 The more corporations have consolidated, the more formerly competing media outlets have become owned by the same parent corporations. Although the exact ratio of media outlets to corporate ownership is disputed, it is clear that several corporations, including General Electric, Viacom, News Corporation, and Time-Warner, own the majority of cable news networks and newspaper syndicates.

One consequence of this consolidation is that the monopoly of the market correlates with the “monopoly of meaning” so to speak. The less diversified the sources of news are, the less diversified the language for describing and evaluating news events and politics becomes. Media practitioners, especially “talking heads” and partisan pundits, frame information in almost identical ways as fewer news wire services limit the terminology reproduced by subscribers. News agencies and reporters then repeat this language over and over, and thus fewer and fewer critical alternatives exist for describing and evaluating these events. The result is that you can hear the same discussion in nearly the same words wherever you look. This encourages the belief that what you’re hearing is the authoritative view, even if it’s just the most repeated one.

Another consequence of corporate consolidation of media is the intensification of the news cycle, so that all media outlets simultaneously and continuously report on events. This inevitably frames events in ways that restrict alternative perspectives from being introduced to viewers. A widely discussed example in studies of media and cognition is the so-called “crack” crisis of the 1980s, which was perpetuated by media relying on false and falsified information.

Where was the press’s information coming from? Surveys of media’s report on crack reveal that the vast majority of experts cited in news reports of the drug were taken from law-enforcement communities and politicians, followed by interviews from punters on the street. The single least-cited sources were academics—the people who had actually studied the drug. The reason? Academics tend to be less sensational and more circumspect. They don’t launch into vitriolic condemnations of crack the way police and politicians do. In short, their sound bites aren’t as good.122

More recently, the ubiquitous phrase “weapons of mass destruction,” which was used by the Bush Administration in the build up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002, led the American Dialect Society to vote “WMD” as “Word of the Year.” Such examples demonstrate that the “bottleneck” of corporate ownership over media outlets has immense influence over the meaning of news events, in effect controlling the political impact of these events through sensational language, repetition, and selective use of sources. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence that information also has to be approved for audiences in advance, further restricting the diverse dissemination of transparent information. Whistle-blowers point out instances of censorship inside newspapers and cable news programs in an effort to expose the fact that partisan politics increasingly