The Media Monopoly's 'Code of Silence'

EDITORIAL

Bill O’Reilly, the infamous right-wing TV host of The O’Reilly Factor, asked one of his guests the other day an interesting question about the claim that “9/11 was an inside job”.

O’Reilly: “If there were a shred of legitimate evidence for this story, it would be all over the place. … Why won’t any responsible news organization print this stuff? … This would be the story of the century. It’s no place.” (Read the exchange on p. 70 of Issue 12)

My answer to this conundrum is that the major news organizations aren’t responsible ... at least to the public’s interests. Instead they are responsible to the corporate masters they serve. Hence the media blackout on any alternative theories about what might have happened on 9/11 and furthermore the lack of political will to re-open 9/11, despite the hundreds of unanswered questions.

There are two factors involved here. One is the amount of media concentration and the other is who it is that controls that concentration. There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s capitalist neoconservatives that are controlling the US mainstream media and they are tied into the military-industrial-complex as well as Big Oil. War suits them just fine and the holy “war on terror” which “will not end in our lifetimes” – as Dick Cheney proudly says – is their trillion dollar dream come true.

The first factor is also a major part of the problem, because it’s a lot easier to control a handful of big companies than hundreds of little ones. It’s the essence of monopoly capitalism. The less competition, the more control you have of the news you have and the easier it is to ‘manufacture consent’ – in this case the consent to carrying on the “war on terror.”

Media baron Ted Turner apparently agrees: “There’s really five companies that control 90 percent of what we read, see and hear. It’s not healthy,” he said. (John Nichols & Robert W. McChesney in FCC: Public Be Damned, June 2, 2003.) These five huge US communications groups control 85% of prime-time viewing (according to FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps at Columbia Law School , Jan. 16, 2003).

Others say: “Six major companies control most of the media in our country.” (Common Cause and Wikipedia, May 21, 2007.) Together they “own more than 90% of the media holdings in the United States .” The difference in opinion apparently is that the sixth company, which is German, is more involved in publishing in the US than in television broadcasting. But it does have a huge impact on the print media in the US .

WHO OWNS WHAT IN THE US MAINSTREAM MEDIA?

Here’s an acronym I have come up with to make it easier to remember the BIG SIX media conglomerates, so you can tell your friends:

D-A-VI-GE-RM-BAG (Pronounced: “Davi-germ-bag”).

Here’s the list of who owns what (with approximate sales in 2005, according to Hoovers.com)

D        Disney (owns ABC, Touchstone Pictures, Buena Vista, Hollywood Pictures, Caravan Pictures,      Miramax Films, the History Channel, A&E, Discover magazine, etc. – with $34B in sales);

A          AOL/Time Warner (owns CNN, HBO, Warner Bros. Film and TV Production, Castle Rock, TIME, Sports Illustrated, People, Entertainment Weekly, Money, Fortune, Netscape, etc.– with $53B in sales);

VI         Viacom (owns CBS, Paramount Pictures, Simon & Schuster, Pocket Books, Blockbusters, Showtime, MTV, The Movie Channel and Nickelodeon, BET, Nickelodeon, etc. – with $28B in sales);

GE       General Electric (owns NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo, Universal Pictures and 13 televison stations, etc. besides being heavily involved in the aerospace and arms industry, etc. – with $163B in sales);

RM       Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (owns FOX TV, DirecTV, TV Guide, New York Post, The Weekly Standard, Harper Collins, Twentieth Century Fox and MySpace, etc. – with $31B in sales).

BAG    Bertelsmann AG – One of the world’s top media firms, owns Europe’s RTL TV, Random House,  Bantam Dell, Doubleday, Alfred A. Knopf, Vintage Books, etc. –  with $21B in sales.

Can you imagine a board meeting between the owners of these companies in some Caribbean resort far away from the prying eyes of the public? It would be easy enough for them to agree to back George Bush’s ‘official story’ of 9/11 and deep-six any other conspiracy theories. You could call it a gentlemen’s agreement – held in a code of silence between them all. After all, it wouldn’t be good for business if the war on terror came to a grinding halt, would it?

Well that’s the feeling I get when I see such little coverage of the truth about what really happened on 9/11.

What we decided to do with this issue was to bring all their major coverage of one issue – the 9/11 debate – together into one place and examine it for five things: 1. Objectivity 2. Accuracy 3. Fairness 4. Quality and 5. Quantity. The results you will find astounding. There is indeed evidence that the mainstream media (MSM) is not only complicit in a cover-up of the facts and evidence surrounding the most important event in modern times, but that they are co-conspirators in 9/11 – undoubtedly the greatest crime of all time. But I’ll let you, the reader, be the judge of that.

I would like to thank all the contributors to this issue, especially my colleague Barrie Zwicker, who had a field day exposing all the censorship and B.S. we’ve been spoon-fed by the MSM. You’ll get a chuckle reading his colorful critiques. But you may also cry a little when you realize how much we have been deceived – and at such a cost! – by those we used to trust in the mainstream media. Well, good riddance to bad rubbish. Let’s go with the alternative media and support the truth!

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For more stories, plus many more extras, please get your copy of Issue #12 at our on-line store.

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