aro0823, herman and chomsky

“Television is an advertising-supported medium, and to the extent that support falls out, programming will change” (268)
I was a bit taken aback by this reading due to the sheer fact that I could understand it and the concepts are applicable to my everyday life. As we discussed in class last week, our generation has never known life without constant advertisement bombardment. Because they are so prominent, it appears on the surface level that advertisements need television, internet, newspaper, etc. to survive, not the other way around. The thought never struck me that “without their support, [the media] would cease to be economically viable” (266). I would argue that, without advertisements, the media would still exist in localized forms, but the globalized media conglomerates that dominate the airwaves and make millions could not.
In this type of hypothetical situation, a world without billion dollar media conglomerates, the news could be about real objectivity, not just ‘objectivity’ within capitalistic bureaucratic constraints. Because the dominant media firms are nothing more than businesses, they seek to appeal to other businesses to make profit instead of operating within their assumed niche of newsgathering and informing the populace about “the real story.” I lament the fact that there is no true newsgathering organization. The stories that the public should actually know about are hidden behind thousands of spools of red tape created by high-powered lawyers. It is logical to take a constructivist approach to dissecting this propaganda industry because the media is only what we make it out to be. Before horizontal and vertical integration became fashionable, regulatory laws didn’t have to exist. After the onset of regulation laws, lobbying became vital. Then, came along the necessity for the revolving door between the public and the private spheres. At the heart of this mess lies the advertising industry, who arbitrarily assigned value where value should not be assigned. The advertising industry made impossible for independent media to exist, or even any story with substance or a hint of controversy. Who needs to know about the “military industrial complex, corporate support and benefits from Third World tyrannies” or environmental depredation worldwide, for in today’s industry, the only important consideration is if Rupert Murdoch can add a few million more businesses to his worldwide, hundred billion dollar conglomeration.