The corporate grip on opinion in the U.S. is one of the wonders of the Western world. English. As for politics, that’s simple: It’s either us (what the silver-tongued felon Spiro Agnew, or his wordsmith William Satire, so memorably dubbed “ the greatest nation in the country” ) or them—foreigners who envy us our vast choice of detergents, our freedom to repeat as loudly as we want the national prayers, our alabaster cities to whichv we tell ourselves, they can’t wait to emigrate. On the other hand, the average American, when it comes to his own welfare, is very shrewd indeed. He knows that we are in an economic decline and that our quality of life, though better than that of Russia (all that really matters, our priests hum softly) is noticeably lousy. But the reasons for our decline are never made clear because the corporate ownership of the country has absolute control of the populist pulpit—“ the media” —as well as of the schoolroom. David Hume’s celebrated 1758 Of the First Principles of Government has never been more to the point than now: Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinions. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular. The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonCorporate America enjoys the freedom to make money without the slightest accountability to those they are killing. ders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity—much less dissent. Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is no time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions intended, like the avowed commercials, to keep docile huddled masses, keep avid for products addled consumers. I seldom watch television. But when I do set out to twirl the dial, it is usually on Sunday, when our corporate rulers address us from their cathode pulpit. Seedy Washington journalists, sharp-eyed government officials who could not dispose of a brand-new car in Spokane, think-tank employees, etiolated from too long residence ’ neath fla t rocks, and always, always, Henry Kissinger, whose destruction of so many Asians and their once-charming real estate won him a prize for peace from the ironists of outer Europe. The level of the chat on those programs is about as low as it is possible to get without actually serving the viewers gin. The opinion expressed ranges from conservative to reactionary to joyous neofascist. There is even, in William Satire, an uncloseted anti-Gentile. I was once placed between two waxworks on a program where one of the pair was solemnly identified as a “ liberal” ; appropriately, he seemed to have been dead for some time, while the conservative had all the vivacity of someone on speed. For half an hour it is the custom of this duo to “ crossfire” cliches of the sort that would have got them laughed out of the Golden Branch Debating Society at Exeter. On air, I identified the conservative as a liberal and vice versa. The conservative fell into the trap. “ No, no!” he hyperventilated. “ I’m the conservative!” (What on earth they think these two words mean no one will ever know.) It was the liberal who got the point; from beyond, as it were, the tomb he moaned, “ He’s putting us on.” l HAVEBEENINVOLVED in television since the early 1950s, when it ceased to be a novelty and became the principal agent for the simultaneous marketing of consumer goods and of national security state opinion. Although I thought I knew quite a bit about the ins and outs of the medium, I now know a lot more, thanks to Ben H. Bagdikian’s The Media Monopoly (“ second edit ion . comp le te ly updated & expanded” ) and Manufacturing Consent, a study of “ the political economy of the mass media,” by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. These two studies demonstrate exactly how the few manipulate opinion. To begin with: The average American household keeps the set throbbing seven hours a day. This means the average American has watched 350,000 commercials by age 17. Since most opinion is now controlled by twenty-nine corporations—due to be at least one fewer if Time-Warner or Paramount-Time or, most chilling of all, Nation-Time comes to pass, one can then identify those twenty-nine C.E.O.s as a sort of politburo or college of cardinals, in strict charge of what the people should and should not know. They also select the Presidents and the Congresses or, to be precise, they determine what the politicians may talk about at election time—that famed agenda that never includes the interesting detail that, in peacetime, more than two-thirds of the Federal revenue goes to war [see Vidal, “ How to Take Back Our Country,” The Nation, June 4, 1988], Although AIDSf can be discussed as a means of hitting out at unpopular minorities, the true epidemic can never be discussed: the fact that every fourth American now alive will die of cancer. This catastrophe is well kept from the public by the tobacco companies, the nuclear power companies (with their bungled waste disposal) and other industries that poison the earth so that corporate America may enjoy the freedom to make money without the slightest accountability to those they are killing. *HE INVENTIONOFTHE talk show on television was, at first, a most promising development. Admittedly, no one very radical would ever be allowed on, but a fair range of opinion could be heard; particularly as the Vietnam War began to go bad. On the original Today show, Hugh Downs and I would talk off and on for an hour as news, weather, commercials floated lazily by. But Hazel Bishop, an obscure lipstick company, changed all that. The firm began running commercials not linked to specific programs and it was soon determined that the thirty-second commercial duplicates exactly the attention span of the average viewer. Therefore, no in-depth interview can last for more than seven minutes; three minutes is considered optimum. Recently, I found m yse lf c o n f ro n t in g the amiable Pat Sajak. I was all set to do what I think of as my inventing-the- wheel-in-seven-minutes (why what’s wrong is wrong and what to do) when my energy level crashed. I did say that if you wanted to know what the ownership of the country wants you to know, tune in to Nightline and listen to Ted Koppel and his guests. The effect of this bit of information must have been surreal. Since no voices other than those of the national consensus are heard, how could a viewer know that there are any other viewpoints? I was made aware of the iron rules in 1968, when William F. Buckley Jr. and I had our first live chat on ABC at the Republican Convention in Miami Beach. I was billed as the conservative; he as the pro-crypto —or was it the other way around? Anyway, we were hired to play the opinion game in order to divert the audience from the issues. Buckley Junior’s idea of a truly deep in-depth political discussion is precisely that of corporate America’s. First, the Democrat must say that the election of a Republican will lead to a depression. Then the Republican will joyously say, Ahhahhhhh, but the Democrats always lead us into war! After a few minutes of this, my attention span snapped. I said that there was no difference at all between the two parties because the same corporations paid for both, usually with taxpayers’ money, tithed, as it were, from the faithful and then given to “ defense,” which in turn passes it on to those candidates who will defend the faith. With that bit of news for the national audience I revealed myself not only as an apostate to the national religion; I came close to revealing 6 Clinton St. Quarterly—WInter, 1989-90
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