DisneyAOLViacom Owns Your Butt

DisneyAOLViacom Owns Your Butt
After all, who the hell wants diversity and choice in major media? Thanks, FCC!
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Wednesday, June 4, 2003
http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/

Ah, screw it. Let's just give in. Let's just laugh bitterly and toss back a shot of something potent and grain based and throw ourselves under the GOP steamroller and give in to the great excruciating cosmic joke of it all.

Because here comes the hilarious bit about the three corporate-slut Republicans who voted down the two pro-choice Democrats to relax FCC restrictions and allow gluttonous media megacorps to own multiple (and, yes, competing) media outlets in the same market, the same city, in your very town.

Which is of course just another way of saying: bigger companies, more consolidation, fewer indie voices, bye bye diversity and perspective, yay yay go go ViacomDisneyAOLMicrosoftNewsCorpExxonWalMartSatan!

To put it another way, the gods of draconian blandness over at Disney could, right now, hypothetically, snatch up as many as three major TV stations, eight radio stations, the cable-TV company and the only major newspaper, all in the very same city. Maybe your city. Aww look, it really is a small media world after all.

Even if they compete with one another, even if each outlet draws its resources from the other, even if they all hew to the same tightly controlled story lines, spin, marketing gimmicks, perspective, thuddingly mediocre opinioneering, bottom lines, they can still own it all. Isn't that heartening? God bless America.

"Our actions will advance our goals of diversity and localism," FCC Chairman and noted sniveling GOP errand boy Michael Powell actually had the nerve to say, in public, as lightning, surprisingly, did not strike him dead on the spot.

And if you don't laugh at this, if you don't absolutely insist on enjoying the bitter ironies of the massive shameless corporatization of this nation like Satan enjoys shrieking root canals, if you don't passionately demand that your soul view U.S. political culture as a massive reeling circus masquerading as a solemn drama, you will be compelled to scream and narcotize and run off to the woods with a case of Grey Goose and the collected W.H. Auden and an iPod loaded with only Metallica and Chopin, never to be heard from again.

You simply have to admire the utterly shameless anti-choice rallying cry, the "more power for corporations" sloganeering, the astounding brazenness with which the GOP machine is working like frothing dogs to quell independent voices and Keep America Dumb.

Hell, even the NRA was opposed to this vote, as were countless consumer groups, religious organizations, small broadcasters, writers, academics and countless more (and yes, even some Republicans). Strange indeed are the bedfellows when you realize it ain't only liberal or alternative voices that will be actively pummeled and restricted.

Simply and obviously put, the charming pro-corporate FCC vote enthusiastically slaps all-American ideas of diversity and free speech and open-ended dialogue and dissent, and does everything to promote ideas of more and more benumbed media voices owned by fewer and fewer companies that couldn't care one whit less about anything but profit and control and the further consolidation of power.

And here's the kicker: Still conservatives pule, "Damn that liberal media." Still you hear the GOP endlessly whine, "Damn liberals won't let America flourish." Oh you glorious bastards. Oh you self-indulgent pseudo-geniuses.

And oh how they love the irony of that lie, of how they'd be hard pressed to find a single truly liberal major pundit expounding her views on any of the major networks, anywhere, while the airwaves are absolutely saturated with Hannity and Limbaugh and Stern, Anne Coulter and G. Gordon Liddy and George Will and Pat Robertson and Ollie North.

Spread all over, they are, from CNN to CBS to Fox News, each happily spouting largely jingoistic, pro-war rhetoric. Hey, fearmongering and isolationism and anti-lib screeching -- it's where the money is, baby.

And now, with this FCC decision, it will only get worse. Now a nation already completely exhausted from the major media's (and BushCo's) incessant beat of the drums of war and fear and terror and isolationism will feel their very eardrums scream, as the corporate muscles that pound those drums will get even stronger.

Ah, screw it. Wal-Mart is already the world's largest and most powerful retailer, a wicked arbiter of taste and censorship. Starbucks is already the world's largest coffee chain, often opening new stores within latte-spitting distance of one another. McDonald's is already the world's most toxic garbage-food purveyor, helping keep America obese and cancerous and happily drugged.

So then, why not the media? Why not let AOL Time Warner or Murdoch's draconian News Corp. own every major media joint in town? It is, after all, just another part of the mad pageant, all part of America's absolutely lethal fascination with unchecked capitalism and our leaders' utter devotion to creating a modern-day oligarchy, a fabulous and heavily branded and cleverly trademarked and well-packaged type of easily digestible made-for-TV fascism.

And you just have to laugh. Aloud. Right now. At BushCo following through on his one major promise, to run this country just like a failing, top-heavy, megalomaniacal corporation, full of greed-drunk execs who rake their peons over the coals, gut their 401(k)s, cook the books and run the factory into massive debt and dysfunction, all while emaciated slave boys polish their golden escape pods.

What, too bitter? Too fatalistic? Too extremist liberal fantasy? Nah. Just part of the divine circus, really. It's right there on your Viacom-owned TV. And all they want you to do is tune in, shut up, and stop caring.


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Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.

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