Inside Media Project

M -- we begin...as you can see, this could easily take years to do, yet every bit added is interesting and fleshes out the picture, creates a valuable resource...Jude Wanniski used to do a really cool media guide about fifteen years ago; only one of its kind have seen: it rated and gave descriptions of major journalists in the U.S. Polyconomics put it out. We would like to do something like that. The first step is simply to get the facts about the players.

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MEDIA OVERVIEW/The critics and their lines of argument

There are three approaches to media criticism:

1) the Jew-led left attacks corporate consolidation
2) the Jew-led right attacks liberal content bias
3) the Whites attack the controlling Jews.

1) the leftist critique... Media criticism from the left consists of cries about corporate consolidation and little more.

ANALYSTS pushing this line...

Jew Mark Crispin Miller is probably the "name" academic media analyst. He is a professor of media studies at New York University, where he directs the Project on Media Ownership, and the author of The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder (Norton). He used to be at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.



What he says...

For one thing, the cartel's rise has made extremely rare the sort of marvelous exception that has always popped up, unexpectedly, to startle and revivify the culture--the genuine independents among record labels, radio stations, movie theaters, newspapers, book publishers and so on. Those that don't fail nowadays are so remarkable that they inspire not emulation but amazement. Otherwise, the monoculture, endlessly and noisily triumphant, offers, by and large, a lot of nothing, whether packaged as "the news" or "entertainment."

What he sees...

-- gigantic scale and thoroughness of the corporate concentration
-- general bitching about anti-democratic nature; not meeting needs of non-rich, no one thinking about "public interest"
-- giant corporations...are ultimately hostile to the welfare of the people
-- helped Bush steal the 2000 election
--We therefore must take steps to liberate the media from oligopoly, so as to make the government our own.

[Note: what's actually remarkable about the media is that although the players change, shuffle and reform, what is NOT SAID remains the same.]

Another prominent media critic who takes the corporate-consolidation route is Robert McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times, a boring book that tells you in a few hundred pages what could be plainly put in a handful of paragraphs. He is research professor in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois. He pushes a line indistinguishable from Miller's.



What he says...

There's very little diversity in a certain way. It's the appearance of diversity, but without it.

The commercial logic is the idea that everything is dedicated to the idea of selling something. The whole point of the relationship with the teen is to turn them upside-down and shake all the money out of their pockets. That's the sole purpose of it--the artistic, the creative.

You should look at it like the British or the French empires in the nineteenth century. Teens are like Africa. There's this range that they're going to take over, and their weaponry is films, music, books, CDs, internet access, clothing, amusement parks, sports teams. That's all this weaponry they have to make money off of this market, to colonize this market.

What's happened in popular music in the last 25 years is that window of opportunity for new musical art forms to develop and have some integrity before they get grabbed by the big companies has been narrowed, because these companies are searching out anything. They want to be the first one in to get the band that's going to be the next big hit, the next grunge, the next hip-hop. So there's not that incubation period anymore. Now they hear about some guy in the South Bronx who's doing something different, and man, they're up there in the next cab. Two days later, the guy's got a contract.

You mean when it's more commercialized? I'm not a great culture theorist. I'm not even a bad cultural theorist. I'm not really a cultural theorist. So I'd be careful to give the answer to this, but my hunch--as sort of a political economist assessing these industries--if, in fact, the political critique of music is zapped out, the people want controversy in their lives. They want that sense of struggle and conflict. Then you replace it with sort of the Howard Stern-Eminem stuff, a lot of misogyny, a lot of violence, which gives the illusion of conflict and tension and excitement without the real thing. It's just picking on the weakest members of society. That seems very controversial, and it's commercially viable, but it's not the real thing.

Yes. I've heard of Limp Bizkit--nothing very favorable about them. But yes, I think there's a real need people have that's trying to be met, and the market meets it by giving them a sort of white rage, teen rage groups. But the content is just a marketing ploy for an intensive purpose that plays on the sorts of biases to pick on the weakest members, and to stay away from those powerful members of society. So it's a very unthreatening type of resistance. It's easy to pick on gay people and minorities and women. That's not going to . . . you aren't going to have to worry about it.

[Note: This is purely ideological thinking, the sound of a guy not paying attention.]

All of the media companies are commercial, but the other ones tend to have a higher percentage of money that comes from amusement parks, film sales, books--things that don't rely directly on advertising. Viacom is directly an advertising-related company. They've taken American radio and almost single-handed turned it into a 24-hour infomercial on every station. And that's their genius. The head of Viacom and Sumner Redstone are all about maximizing commercial return. They make that quite clear. And if you look at MTV in that context, you get a sense of what they're all about.

We talk about how there's been a separation between creative and commercials eroding in this conglomerate culture. Well, Viacom is the lead army. They're the Napoleons of the war on that separation. They lead the fight in turning every nanosecond of time on their stations into something that's selling something. And so you look at MTV or VH1, this sister channel or brother channel, and it's really a 24-hour infomercial. Every second on the air is selling something. It's either directly selling a product, or it's going to be a program hyping a new movie that's paid for by the studio. It's really an infomercial for the studio. Or it's going to be a video, which is an infomercial for a record label. And everything that's worn on the set, the clothes that are worn by the people there, is consciously planned to sell some product somewhere. So it's really taken this whole process to the very limit.

It's a marketing genius. There's no question about it, but it's marketing genius. That's the only type of genius it is. There's nothing else to it, but it is pure marketing genius.

One of the genius moves of Sumner Redstone and Viacom also, in additional to commercializing everything, is they slash costs. They're really famous for going into the entertainment industry and reducing the cost dramatically from what the traditional pattern has been for primetime television shows or for movies.

Well, now payola's legal again. It's okay to do payola, but now the money doesn't go to a disk jockey, who's a powerless figure. The money goes to the company that owns it. So if you're a label and you pay enough money to CBS or Viacom to get your music on their stations, you could actually buy your way on. . . . So that integrity . . . is lost. You can't really believe the music you're listening to is there because some of it actually is good music. It might only be there because someone bought a bunch of ads on that station and, therefore, earned the right to get their music played on that station.

...there are only five companies that sell 90 percent of the music in the United States and 80 percent of the music worldwide.

the independent labels historically played a very important role in the music industry, just like small businesses play an important role in all industries. They do the research and development that would be too costly for the big company to do. The minute they strike something, the big company just buys it out. And big companies in the music industry, as in other industries, discovered it's a lot cheaper to let a thousand people kill themselves trying the make a fortune on the margins and buy the ones that are successful than trying to bankroll all thousand.

And that's what the small labels do now. That's their function in our music industry. They all kill themselves trying to find the next Nirvana, the next real thing. Then if they stumble on something, they get bought out. Subpop Records, which was responsible for Nirvana and grunge, is the classic case in point. A terrific independent label, and then they sell it for $50 million or $100 million to Time Warner, once they make it big. Does that then affect the nature of the content of those labels? Of course it does, because when an Innerscope or a Subpop is bought, or when they have a relationship with a major label . . . the major label is implicitly saying, "We want more of that stuff that makes money. We didn't buy you to make artistic statements. We bought you to produce another Nirvana and another Pearl Jam and another number one hit."

And that often changes a logic of how these labels work in the first place--which were much closer to the ground, that were more concerned with good music, and that the commercial side would then take care of itself if you come up with great artists. But now that you get the commercial value more in the front seat, you're looking at, "Well, does this person look like they'd be a good grunge singer? Do they have a same sound as Nirvana?" instead of, "Do they have their own distinct sound?" So I think the effects are largely negative, but they play a very important role, and that will always be an important role.

I think the concern about the internet and Napster is that there's a good chance that that ultimately might be what it will do--be a farm system for these commercial giants. They will let the internet sort of breed these, and then they can pluck the ones that look like they have a following.

[Note: A basic flaw of the leftist approach is the idea that what "the people" -- who always share their advocate's position on everything, always -- want should be sacrosanct. But what the people always want is something for nothing. The analysis of guys like McChesney and Miller is that they should get it!; that somebody is obligated to provide it. And that somebody is government. M&M's view is that "the people" should have money taken from them at gunpoint to provide the something-for-well-not-really-nothing media through...the very guys who interview these "independent analysts" in the first place: PBS, NPR...public trough-feeders. Of course, "the people" don't want that either, but no biggie. Since the people want free media, they should be taxed at gunpoint to have it provided. That's illogical. What M&M mean but are too crafty to put straight is that freely chosen media is inferior to gun-bought government media. I suppose it's merely uncharitable of me to point out that the talents of these two are far more sought by government media than private. M&M don't want what "the people" want, they want what they want in the name of the people. They're simply crying that what they like isn't valued enough by others.]

It really promotes the sort of world in which you don't think anything matters unless it serves you, unless it serves your material gain. Why be honest? Why have integrity? Why care about other people? That's for chumps. It's all about taking care of number one. The dominant institutions in society, the values they send out is, "We're just here to make money off of you. We're just here to take advantage of you." The message that goes out to everyone in that system is, "Yes, everyone should be everyone for themselves. Just take care of number one. Why should I care about that other person? What's in it for me?"

What's happened in the media in the United States in the past 10 or 15 years, especially since about 1994 or 1995, has been an unprecedented concentration of ownership. So we have seven or eight companies now, which own these largest media companies. All are film studios. All are TV networks. Four of the five music companies that sell 90 percent of the music in the United States own almost all the TV stations in the largest markets. They're huge conglomerates, and this is really a new thing. It used to be that the largest media companies, 20 or 40 years ago, only produced newspapers, they only made movies, they only had a TV network. Now they're dominant players in each of these markets. They're highly non-competitive. They don't have to worry about a newcomer coming in. The barriers to entry, as economists talk about, are so high that basically, they've got a private club. It's a gentleman's club of about a half-dozen, seven, eight companies that really rule the thing.

Robert McChesney is a media critic and author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times. He is research professor in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois. To the casual observer, it seems like there's a tremendous increase in consumer choice, especially for kids. Why isn't that a great thing? If you define it simply as "consumer choice," it's the plenitude that you can select from that could or could not be a great. That'd be an interesting discussion, but I don't think that's really the dominant thing that's taking place with children having a range of choice. It's the nature of the choice, and how the choices are laid out there, that is really the most striking feature of it. I think there that the issue isn't really the amount of choice; it's the amount of sort of commercialism that permeates all the choices. So, on one hand, while it seems like you have a massive range of choice, they're really underneath it girded by the same commercial logic. There's very little diversity in a certain way. It's the appearance of diversity, but without it. What's that commercial logic? The commercial logic is the idea that everything is dedicated to the idea of selling something. The whole point of the relationship with the teen is to turn them upside-down and shake all the money out of their pockets. That's the sole purpose of it--the artistic, the creative. There's traditionally been a distinction between the editorial or creative side and the commercial side. It was a common theme in our media for much of the twentieth century. It has always been a nebulous relationship. Commercial factors have invariably weighed in and influenced the creative and editorial side. But that relationship has really collapsed in the past ten years. The barrier between them, the notion that there should be an integrity . . . to the creative product or to the editorial product--distinct from the needs of commercial interests to make as much money as possible to just stand on its own--is corroded. It has come under sustained pressure, because the people who actually make the decisions are commercial people. And those values ultimately are permeating the creative side. This affects children's and teens' cultures, as much as all other cultures, maybe even more so, due to the importance of that market to marketers for a lifetime of consumption. The marketers we've talked to seem to feel that there's almost an ethic in the fact that they do focus groups and consumer testing and they find out what these kids really want. So in a sense . . . the teens' power is on the rise. It's quite the opposite, actually. The purpose of the focus group is never to find out what teens want per se. It's to find out what teens want so they can make the most money off it as possible. What they're looking for is simply within the range of what they can make the most money off of. It's not a legitimate search for anything that teens might possibly want. It's not an open-ended hunt. If they were to find out that most teens aren't interested in something, but still this company can make money off selling it to them, they're still going to sell it to them. It's a self-serving argument to say that this research is done to basically serve teens. It's done to better manipulate teens. What is left out of a consumer research project with teens that doesn't fall into the category of something to make money on? . . . What if the focus groups asked, "Do you really want your musicians connected to products?" In teens, if they found out, "No. We don't really want the musicians whose music we listen to connected to underpants and deodorant and buttons and wear." The response to that would not be, "Okay. We won't do that." The response would be, "Well, how can we do that without pissing them off?" That's how you would take that focus group information if you were a marketer. How can you still make money off that but not antagonize them? And if it's a legitimate focus group, they say, "Okay. That's a legitimate concern. They want their musicians to just do music." But that's not something they can do, because there's no money in that. Do you see other values being sucked out of teen culture as a result? Absolutely. The whole name of integrity . . . sounds corny or banal, because we live in cynical times. The whole notion that there's some reason to do something outside of just making money off it is lost in a culture in which the sole point is to make money off you. You're told that's the whole reason for this being in existence. In popular music, there's a huge difference if you ultimately think the reason you're listening to this music is because these musicians basically were hired because of some marketing thing--and it's all a scam just to make money--rather than these are musicians who are artists and having something to say to you, it's a relationship with you, they really believe in something. . . .I don't know if we'll really know the effects, ultimately, for a while. So I'm speculating. But I can't see anything good about it. Nothing good that comes out of it, only bad. . . . Has this all . . . negatively affected the entertainment companies? No, no. In fact, I think they're in the midst of it. In fact, it's maybe very much the opposite. The entertainment companies are a handful of massive conglomerates that own four of the five music companies that sell 90 percent of the music in the United States. Those same companies also own all the film studios, all the major TV networks, and pretty much all the TV stations in the ten largest markets. They own all or part of every single commercial cable channel. They look at the teen market as part of this massive empire that they're colonizing. You should look at it like the British or the French empires in the nineteenth century. Teens are like Africa. There's this range that they're going to take over, and their weaponry is films, music, books, CDs, internet access, clothing, amusement parks, sports teams. That's all this weaponry they have to make money off of this market, to colonize this market. And that's exactly how they approach it. So they look at music as just one small part of it. They aren't music companies; they're moneymaking companies, and music is a weapon that generates money for them. Can you describe the way the copycat syndrome works? The music industry's probably the most interesting one to study culturally, for a number of reasons. But the primary reason, in an economic sense, is that music is the least capital-intensive of all our modern commercial media. To make a good movie, even a low-budget one, costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not the low millions. But if you have a pretty expensive tape recorder and equipment, instruments, you can make great music in a garage. Music is fairly inexpensive. So music's always had a very interesting relationship between the companies--the musicians and the users. Because the costs are so low, anyone can really do it. Commercial music has had a very contradictory relationship with artists in the last 50 years, say, since the rise of the electric guitar and the rise of popular music in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the modern notion of popular music with the small combos. And what we see is that people who are students of music, or even fans, would say that the great trends in music have invariably come outside of sort of the commercial networks. They've come from ghettos or barrios. They've come from college towns, but they're people who play music because they love it and it means something in their lives. And if you go through the history of popular music since the post-war years--starting with rock 'n roll, which grew out of rhythm and blues, going on to soul, to 1960s rock, to the punk movement, reggae, hip-hop--none of them started in the research and development department of EMI Records. All of them started in a barrio or in Kingston, Jamaica, or in the South Bronx. And then it's a very interesting process in which they're sort of appropriated, or, to use an academic term, "colonized"--I think "colonized" is a better term, in which they're taken in and then they try to figure out the way to make the most money out of it, if you're the company. "Yes, boy, this hip-hop is really good. What can we do with it?" "Well, we'll have Colonel Sanders do hip-hop in a commercial," or something like that. Or "We'll have Rod Stewart add some hip-hop licks to his next CD." And then you say, "Well, now we need someone who can do more of this hip-hop stuff. Let's find some people that fit that demographic model who look like they'd be really right-on hip-hop artists." It's the same thing for punk or grunge. And in the process, the sort of commercial value is putting the cart in front of the horse. The commercial values start determining the content, rather than the content bringing the commercialism behind it to sort of pay the bills and sell the product. And it loses . . . authenticity. It loses its connection to the audience. Its creativity becomes a joke, ultimately. It becomes farce. Our schlocky culture has been filled with sort of these artists that we make fun of, and they're almost humorous in a way, but ultimately they're tragic. And I think the real irony of our commercial media system is that it can't really help this in music. They do what's rational. They're trying to locate the thing, the real thing, the next real thing. But soon as they find it, they almost snuff it out, because they put the commercial logic on top of it, which wipes it out. What's happened in popular music in the last 25 years is that window of opportunity for new musical art forms to develop and have some integrity before they get grabbed by the big companies has been narrowed, because these companies are searching out anything. They want to be the first one in to get the band that's going to be the next big hit, the next grunge, the next hip-hop. So there's not that incubation period anymore. Now they hear about some guy in the South Bronx who's doing something different, and man, they're up there in the next cab. Two days later, the guy's got a contract. Before, reggae or hip-hop or punk had years to develop before they became big commercial entities. You really had a whole body of work by a number of great artists that was out there. Or the British invasion in rock 'n roll in the early 1960s. Well, those days are over. So you have the ironic thing, that the effort to get more of this music out kills it off. It leaves us in the. . . current popular situation--the sort of hyper-commercialized sewer. I saw a rapper perform and he got up there and said, "Thanks to Sprite for getting the message out." And these guys were as authentic as there are around today. How is it that they're deluded about the positive force of Sprite pushing their message out? It's not a matter of one particular artist being deluded, going into individual psychology. It's looking ultimately at the whole creative and artistic process. When you're having Sprite sponsor your tours or pay for your recording sessions and you're wearing Sprite logos on your stuff, then it's just a short step to the next thing in line. Once you sort of cross that bridge, you say, "We're for sale." Now, you might do it for good reasons. A lot of artists probably say, "Look, this'll help us do more concerts or maybe make our tickets cheaper, because this is helping us out." It's not that they're actually bad people. Some of them are just greedy. "Let's let them make more money for us and we don't care." Some of them might be very well intended. But the ultimate logic here, the trajectory, is right out of what makes the music great in the first place. And I think that's why there's a great tension now in the musical community. A lot of artists are just really concerned about this. Very famous artists like the Springsteens and the Pearl Jams and a lot of artists aren't famous to some extent, because they won't play this game, because they simply refuse to commercialize their music--commercialize what they try to present to their audience and their relationship to their audience. Do you think this phenomenon is lowering teen taste? That's a highly speculative thing. I don't know. I don't know how you can say that. I think if great music comes on, people are going to respond to it. I don't know. I don't know that you're dumbing down teens so they no longer appreciate a good tune. That's a pretty flexible concept. Teen tastes were dumbed down in the early 1960s in rock 'n roll, listening to that garbage that was passed out from 1959 or 1960 to 1963. They sure got upgraded really fast in 1964. I'm not concerned about that. I think if great music comes on, people will respond. The period that you're talking about is the golden rock '-n roll age between, say, 1940 and 1972. No. Even 1990. You go right through to grunge even, into the 1990s. Before that, great music came from the academy, and after that, I guess great music comes from the corporation. Isn't this just an ascendancy of a new set of filters for what we get? Perhaps, but I don't think great music came from elites prior to World War II. If you study a history of popular music, we have extraordinarily rich creations of folk music in almost every country, especially in the Anglo-Irish tradition that played such a large role here and really influenced all our popular music in the South. What makes American music so exciting is this fusion of African and Anglo-Irish traditions here in Appalachia and in the South that fuels our country music, that fuels our rock 'n roll and popular music and the whole jazz tradition. These traditions were not elite traditions at all, and they've existed for hundreds of years. Especially before the Second World War, they were huge in the country. So in my view, a better way to look at it would be to say we've had these great popular traditions that didn't start in 1945. That was just a new phase of them, because there is a fundamental change that we're in the midst of. It's not like there was a firm break. This commercial pressure has always been there, but it's sort of a quantitative change, as the mathematical law goes, and in a certain way, it seem to be a qualitative change. The influence of marketing and commercial pressures at some point becomes so great that the pond becomes the lake. You really shift the relationship. Commercial value is now permeated such that you have major artists like Britney Spears and 'N Sync, who are basically marketing creations. They're basically, "This is what kids want. We're going to locate the demographics, write the music, use a computer to write the music. Just plug in a few chords." It's quite different from some people playing in their garage who love music and do it for years and have something to say to an audience of people they live with and relate to. We talked to these people who did research with kids in actual bedrooms. . . .There's this feedback loop where the audience seems to sort of suck in everything that's put before them. I know. And I think we're in a really interesting phase, culturally. The notion that there's something distinct from commercial culture comes into question when everything's commercialized. There's the traditional notion that there was this musical thing that could start outside of commercial values. And it's a troubling notion--the idea that our references are so commercialized now that all our dissidents, all our autonomous voices, are getting their cues from MTV on how to revolt. I think that's a real tension that's going on among young people today. For really the first time, in a decade or two, from my experience, we've seen young people, not just college students, having a real concern that their entire culture is this commercial laboratory and that being cool is buying the commercially sanctioned cool clothes. It's a real tension that's going on right now. It'll be very interesting to see how it plays itself out, because I think there's a sense that the sort of MTV-VH1 infomercial view of life--where everything is part of the sales process and being cool is something you buy and an act you sort of pose in-- ultimately that's not a very satisfying or nourishing way to live or to look at the world. And trying to create an alternative is imperative for a lot of young people. But it's very hard to do when all the markers around you are commercial. Are teenagers willing to make their life choices from the offerings that are before them? It's hard to generalize, obviously. It's a lot of human beings, and it comes from a wide variety of backgrounds in the United States. But I think that what I am seeing that's noticeable is that today there's more dissidence among young people. It's more vocal, more clear, than it was five, ten, fifteen years ago, certainly in a long time. I'm 47, and it's certainly since my generation came up that it's the most noticeable. I'm a college professor. I've been seeing students pretty regularly for 17 years, and I don't want to make it sound like we're in the midst of some enormous revolution. But you can see sort of below the surface, slightly below the radar of the media, some bubbling going on that wasn't there five or ten years ago. A lot of it is the sort of political activism among young people that is absolutely unprecedented for 20 or 25 years--these demonstrations in Seattle last year, the demonstrations in Washington at the conventions, the Nader campaign-- in which literally you had hundreds of thousands of people, 18 to 25, doing stuff that I haven't seen that generation do since the 1970s. Do you see some artists that are subconsciously making art about the very phenomenon? I'm sure there are, and this is where my age is preventing me from giving a good answer to that question. That would be a natural expectation. I think that's been going on for a while, and that goes back to Andy Warhol, even before that. The use of commercial culture to critique and understand commercial culture, to both praise it and critique it, but to understand its significance in our life and to use those tools as a means, as artistic weaponry, so to speak. Yes, if you're an artist, I think it's almost unavoidable to do that, in a way. As I said, you're so surrounded by these marketers, to even to criticize it you have to use those tools. Is there some optimistic hope in that these kids might push through it? Yes. I'm very optimistic in that way, but I do think it's closely related to politics ultimately, in the broadest sense of the term. I don't think culture on that level operates independent of politics. In fact, I think one of the reasons why the music has been so lame recently in the United States hasn't had anything to do with the music industry or commercialism. It's been a response to the broader demoralization of public life, of civic life, of social life. I think music gets better and culture gets better when people engage socially and politically. The two go hand in hand. So I think if there's a broadening of interest in social and political issues among people, the music, even within the crummy commercial system, will get better, if you understand the relationship. There are other factors besides just EMI's research and marketing department that influence the nature of music. When those factors are systematically removed by corporations, do you find that music and the sentiment around it coarsens? You mean when it's more commercialized? I'm not a great culture theorist. I'm not even a bad cultural theorist. I'm not really a cultural theorist. So I'd be careful to give the answer to this, but my hunch--as sort of a political economist assessing these industries--if, in fact, the political critique of music is zapped out, the people want controversy in their lives. They want that sense of struggle and conflict. Then you replace it with sort of the Howard Stern-Eminem stuff, a lot of misogyny, a lot of violence, which gives the illusion of conflict and tension and excitement without the real thing. It's just picking on the weakest members of society. That seems very controversial, and it's commercially viable, but it's not the real thing. We saw Insane Clown Posse. There were a lot of just random white young enraged men. The band felt they were really answering a cultural call and that kids who were there felt they really belonged to something. Yes. I've heard of Limp Bizkit--nothing very favorable about them. But yes, I think there's a real need people have that's trying to be met, and the market meets it by giving them a sort of white rage, teen rage groups. But the content is just a marketing ploy for an intensive purpose that plays on the sorts of biases to pick on the weakest members, and to stay away from those powerful members of society. So it's a very unthreatening type of resistance. It's easy to pick on gay people and minorities and women. That's not going to . . . you aren't going to have to worry about it. If you go out and start picking on the WTO and the people that own the country, now that's another matter. And that sort of stuff, that type of critique isn't there. But people want tension. People understand there's something going on in the world--it's not just a "Brady Bunch" world we live in. But they're getting Eminem and this sort of stuff. That's the corporate response. That's what they can hand out. The white rage bands we've talked to so far . . . It seems like they're victimized as much by the corporate process as their audiences are, and they're unconsciously perpetuating the corporate cycle. That wouldn't make sense to me. I would think that a lot of them are very earnest. The musicians, as a rule, tend to be quite earnest, and actually, most artists are. It'd be very hard to do any sort of art if you weren't earnest. Now, some people can pull it off, but most can't. Talk about your take on MTV. To understand MTV, you've got to first look at the parent corporation, which is called Viacom. And Viacom is an extraordinary company. It not only owns MTV, it owns VH1, it owns Black Entertainment Television, it owns CBS, it owns Paramount Pictures, it owns Showtime, it owns Simon & Schuster Book Publishers, it owns Blockbuster video rental, and it also owns about 160 radio stations, all of which are in the largest 12 markets in the country. And it's a commercial powerhouse. More than any other media company, its revenues depend upon ad sales from radio and television and cable. It's the ad-linked one. It's the most commercialized of our media companies. All of the media companies are commercial, but the other ones tend to have a higher percentage of money that comes from amusement parks, film sales, books--things that don't rely directly on advertising. Viacom is directly an advertising-related company. They've taken American radio and almost single-handed turned it into a 24-hour infomercial on every station. And that's their genius. The head of Viacom and Sumner Redstone are all about maximizing commercial return. They make that quite clear. And if you look at MTV in that context, you get a sense of what they're all about. We talk about how there's been a separation between creative and commercials eroding in this conglomerate culture. Well, Viacom is the lead army. They're the Napoleons of the war on that separation. They lead the fight in turning every nanosecond of time on their stations into something that's selling something. And so you look at MTV or VH1, this sister channel or brother channel, and it's really a 24-hour infomercial. Every second on the air is selling something. It's either directly selling a product, or it's going to be a program hyping a new movie that's paid for by the studio. It's really an infomercial for the studio. Or it's going to be a video, which is an infomercial for a record label. And everything that's worn on the set, the clothes that are worn by the people there, is consciously planned to sell some product somewhere. So it's really taken this whole process to the very limit. They're quite candid about this. If you don't talk to the PR people, but you talk to their ad department call them up and disguise your voice saying, "I'm thinking of buying an ad on MTV, but I'm concerned it's not commercial enough." And they'll tell you how commercial it is, what a tremendous thing it is. If you look around the world, it's a global phenomenon. And bluntly, it's all about commercializing the whole teen experience, making youth culture a commercial entity that's packaged and sold to people. So by watching MTV and buying the products there, looking like the people there, buying the music there, you become cool. It's a commercial relationship to coolness, of being acceptable. And if you don't do it, you're a loser. And yet they make this great point of being all about kids. That's the genius of it. Absolutely. It's a genius marketing procedure that works. And, as you've pointed out, it's a self-referential, almost circular thing, where that both sides interact. It's all about commercialism. That's the whole point of it. . . . If there was truth in advertising, you would have Sumner Redstone and the Viacom head be the VJs, these 60-year-old fat guys in suits, who are just counting the money--the guys who own the company and run it. Or they should make Sumner Redstone play a song on the guitar once every hour, the guy who's the owner of Viacom. Because they're the people who run it. That's what the station's all about. This station is really ultimately there to serve Sumner Redstone and the owners of that company. It has nothing to do with kids. They couldn't care less about teenagers. Teenagers are just people to turn upside-down and shake the money out of their pants and then you let go. But the kids buy it. Yes. You're absolutely right. And it's a tension . . . there are some dissidents within it, but you're absolutely right. It's a marketing genius. There's no question about it, but it's marketing genius. That's the only type of genius it is. There's nothing else to it, but it is pure marketing genius. Why do they make more money off that than they would off of good stuff? Well, it's cheaper to produce, on the one hand. One of the genius moves of Sumner Redstone and Viacom also, in additional to commercializing everything, is they slash costs. They're really famous for going into the entertainment industry and reducing the cost dramatically from what the traditional pattern has been for primetime television shows or for movies. They've kept the cost really low. And when you're hyper-commercializing everything, you can get your cost low. If you're making deals with kid clothes manufacturers to let them help you outfit the people and they're going to pay you for it, that gets the cost low. When you're basically just running music videos, which are paid for by the music companies, that keeps your cost really low. So it's all about keeping the cost as low as possible, commercializing it in much as possible, and using market research to sort of make it look as cool as possible. And it has worked. Now it's the A&R guy who's trying to come in and find the next Nirvana or Pearl Jam. They go in to college campuses in college towns, in Chapel Hill or Madison or Urbana-Champaign or whatever it might be in the country. They want to find the kids who are sort of smoking a lot of weed and playing music and hope they stumble across someone who's going to sell 25 million records. And you can build a whole sort of cult thing around them in the community like they had in Seattle in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Once again, it's the logic of whatever it takes to find someone you can sell and package. Back to MTV--"Total Request Live" looks like something, but is it actually something else? ...A very interesting phenomenon has taken place that's really shown the change in our culture. In the 1950s, when rock 'n roll was the king and popular and was really taking off and selling singles was crucial, the biggest scandal that took place in American radio was called "payola." Record companies would come in and pay disk jockeys to play the records for their artists, records that wouldn't be played otherwise if a disk jockey just used their own judgment. And this is considered a huge scandal, because they thought the American people, if you listen to a radio station, you had the right to believe that if it wasn't an ad, that the music was only being played because someone actually thought it was good music. It was an editorial call. And the disk jockeys who were convicted of payola lost their jobs, and some went to prison. It was a massive scandal in the 1950s and early 1960s. Well, now payola's legal again. It's okay to do payola, but now the money doesn't go to a disk jockey, who's a powerless figure. The money goes to the company that owns it. So if you're a label and you pay enough money to CBS or Viacom to get your music on their stations, you could actually buy your way on. . . . So that integrity . . . is lost. You can't really believe the music you're listening to is there because some of it actually is good music. It might only be there because someone bought a bunch of ads on that station and, therefore, earned the right to get their music played on that station. Well, of course, that influences all of us. If you hear that music over and over, there's a much greater chance you're going to like it and buy it than if you never hear it at all. And that filter, that editorial judgment, the idea that there's someone listening to the music who really knows music and cares about it is making a decision this is something that the audience might like--it's been corrupted. It's been turned over to the marketing office, and that's means whoever pays the most money can buy the attention of our audience. And MTV is very much the same way. It is by no means a level playing field that anyone can get on the air just because they have great music. There's a whole politics there in being connected to a large label. Having all sorts of marketing muscle behind you has everything to about whether that music gets heard. So then once you're heard and you're exposed to millions of people, of course, it's going to have an influence. That's the whole premise of advertising. If it didn't have some influence, it wouldn't exist. First of all, you had two relationships. The artists had a longer relationship to marketers, and a more direct relationship to their audience, on the one hand. But then intermediaries, the radio stations, also theoretically had this some integrity to them, so you can trust what they were doing, so they weren't simply going to play records that people paid them to play. So there were sort of these buffers in there. Both of those buffers have been diminished to the point now where it's really like, if you have enough money, you can force your sound, force people listen to it. You can't force them to buy it. If the music's really bad, it's not a slam-dunk, but your odds of success are tremendously greater if you get millions of people to listen to your music than if you can't get them to listen to it. It's impossible to make a hit out of something that no one can ever heard. It looks that with the internet, with Napster and all these other devices, that those voices can get heard. Yes. What's happened with the internet in that regard is really exciting and it's very promising, but it's also still quite problematic. How that's going to play out is unclear at this point, and I wouldn't romanticize the fact that it's going to sort of upturn the system entirely. The recent deal where Napster, for example, is linking now to create a pay service, I think is one of a long list of developments which suggests that we'll see just how effective the internet technology is at overcoming the hyper-commercialization of music and culture. I tend to be skeptical, but I think, once again, we really do have to wait on this one. Have programming and advertising become the same thing now? Well, not the exact same thing. But on MTV, it's all a commercial. You start from the premise that is saying that everything on MTV is a commercial. It is an infomercial. That's all that MTV is. Sometimes it's an explicit advertisement paid for by a company to sell a product. Sometimes it's going to be a video for a music company there to sell music. Sometimes it's going to be the set that's filled with trendy clothes and stuff there to sell a look that will include products on that set. Sometimes it will be a show about an upcoming movie paid for by the studio, though you don't know it, to hype a movie that's coming out from Hollywood. Everything's an infomercial. There is no non-commercial turn of MTV. That's simply a nonexistent segment of the MTV product. It seems that, as it becomes more that way, the MTV editorial and creative process is about moving in on these emotional triggers. Have you seen that phenomenon? I don't watch MTV as much as I used to, partially due to my age, but also because they stopped putting music at some point, and I wasn't interested in the programming except for the music. So I'm not an expert on their content. But what MTV is struggling with is what's going on with all our cultural industries. We have fewer and fewer owners, but more and more choices. So they have to desperately find ways to keep people looking for gimmicks, and they don't have a huge time frame to establish an identity. With the remote control, your shelf-life of chances to keep someone, to get them to stay there, is very short. You can't develop a character every six weeks. They're going to be gone after two minutes. It put pressure on commercial culture providers like MTV to try to find sort of things that their research shows will click right away, recognizable things, and play on those. So when you're flipping the dial and you get there and after ten seconds. you've got one of those or something that hits you so you stay, or after 30 seconds, they know you aren't going to stay there four hours waiting for something. You've got 50 other choices on the dial or you go over to the internet. And the irony is that, with all this choice, so to speak, in our commercial media system, with all these new options which theoretically increases the quality because there'll be all these smaller markets that can be tended to, in some ways what it's doing, though, is increasing the commercial logic and commercial pressure. Because they've got to get you so badly that they have to use tried and true methods that diminish, in some ways, the chances of creativity. Your margin of error is so slim that you can't take chances. Does MTV now have specific relationships with record companies? Traditionally, it's been a source of great tension, because they have had the sort of monopoly over the music video industry since the early 1980s, and they had deals with the major record labels. And, once again, there are only five companies that sell 90 percent of the music in the United States and 80 percent of the music worldwide. They've had exclusive deals where they could be the first ones to get the videos for a certain amount of time before anyone else could get them, which basically was a clearly anti-competitive mechanism. There would be no competition with MTV. And since they're sort of the gatekeeper now, basically, you've got to go through them for certain types of artists to have any hope of really winning out. They have very close relationships to the record labels--extremely close-- and the decisions they make go a long way toward determining the success or failure of acts and of certain releases. How is MTV the ultimate gatekeeper of the American music industry? It's not the only one. The radio system, too, is also an important gatekeeper. The internet is a minor gatekeeper now, but it may become a more important one later. But MTV has been very important for the past 20 years. It's a crucial gatekeeper because so many people watch it, and if an artist is on there, the chances of success increase exponentially. If an artist isn't on there, the chances are very slim. It's like if you're on the ballot for an election or you're a write-in. If you're on the ballot, you've got a shot. If you're a write-in, your chances go way down. And that's what happens, which is why these companies are desperate to work with MTV to get their artist on the air, get them covered by MTV, get them promoted. If you're planning a marketing plan, if you're a music label, MTV's a crucial part of your strategy. You've got to figure out, "Will MTV support my artist and how can we get them to support our artist? What sort of promotional efforts can we do with MTV?" It's a key player in the whole operation now. I can talk about the industrial relationship between small independent and big labels and how they get swallowed up and how that can affect the music industry, if you want. But I can't really talk about the content of the music in any great detail The micro-label subsidiaries of real big labels--are they real? Sure, they're real in the sense they physically exist, philosophically. But the independent labels historically played a very important role in the music industry, just like small businesses play an important role in all industries. They do the research and development that would be too costly for the big company to do. The minute they strike something, the big company just buys it out. And big companies in the music industry, as in other industries, discovered it's a lot cheaper to let a thousand people kill themselves trying the make a fortune on the margins and buy the ones that are successful than trying to bankroll all thousand. And that's what the small labels do now. That's their function in our music industry. They all kill themselves trying to find the next Nirvana, the next real thing. Then if they stumble on something, they get bought out. Subpop Records, which was responsible for Nirvana and grunge, is the classic case in point. A terrific independent label, and then they sell it for $50 million or $100 million to Time Warner, once they make it big. Does that then affect the nature of the content of those labels? Of course it does, because when an Innerscope or a Subpop is bought, or when they have a relationship with a major label . . . the major label is implicitly saying, "We want more of that stuff that makes money. We didn't buy you to make artistic statements. We bought you to produce another Nirvana and another Pearl Jam and another number one hit." And that often changes a logic of how these labels work in the first place--which were much closer to the ground, that were more concerned with good music, and that the commercial side would then take care of itself if you come up with great artists. But now that you get the commercial value more in the front seat, you're looking at, "Well, does this person look like they'd be a good grunge singer? Do they have a same sound as Nirvana?" instead of, "Do they have their own distinct sound?" So I think the effects are largely negative, but they play a very important role, and that will always be an important role. I think the concern about the internet and Napster is that there's a good chance that that ultimately might be what it will do--be a farm system for these commercial giants. They will let the internet sort of breed these, and then they can pluck the ones that look like they have a following. There's the argument that these companies do market research, so they must be giving the people what they want, because obviously they're studying what people want, so they have to give it to them. That's really a fallacious argument. It doesn't stand up to close analysis. What they're trying to do is find out how they can make the most money off of people. So they're going to query them, to see what the areas of entry are. It's not an honest examination of what people really want. I'll give a couple of examples. In the early to mid-1990s, the ad industry in the United States did a survey of people to find out if they wanted any advertising on the internet, and how they felt about it. And something like two-thirds of Americans said, "We want no commercialism on the internet." Well, obviously that was something that was thrown in the wastebasket, because you can't make any money off that. So that meant, "How can we get commercials on the internet without pissing these people off?" That becomes the way you deal with it, not an honest effort to say, "Well, okay. How can we have a non-commercial internet?" No, but a dishonest effort: "How can we manipulate people to have a commercial internet and not piss them off, so we can make as much money as possible?" A second example? A second example is a historical one from the period I've studied in the 1930s. The vast majority of Americans wanted no advertising on radio when radio started in the early 1930s. It was a very intrusive and obnoxious form of advertising, compared to print advertising. You would be listening to a show or music or something, and all of a sudden some sales pitch for mouthwash would come on. Most Americans just thought it was obnoxious. They hated it. But despite this fact, the commercial broadcasters were not going to give them ad-free radio, because they couldn't make money off it. So they just had to come up with ways to make advertising more palatable, and not honor the legitimate desires of the American people. Young people we've talked to experience rage because of this, and then the rage seems to end up being exploited. Yes, it seems to be, in terms of the sort of rage for no particular reason, except for the rage for the hell of it, so to speak. I think that the rebellion notion of popular music and rock 'n roll is a strong part of it, the punk, grunge, all of it. . . . It's always been so, going right back to the beginning of rock 'n roll. And it's something that is increasingly marketed. Maybe because of the commercialism--although I'm not an expert at cultural content--but maybe that accounts for the fact that it seems more and more mindless. Right now, the Sex Pistols seem like some pretty heavy intellectuals, compared to the sort of stuff that's marketed up as rage today. There actually seemed to be something there, even in the nihilism. Does the content get sucked out of the gesture? Yes. It's like, "We need rage, so we have to push these buttons to hit this marketing group, because this demographic that buys this type of blue jeans needs to be pissed off. So we have to give them something to be angry at, or else they won't buy these blue jeans, won't buy this hair dye," or something like that. That's the motivation for it. That's the logic behind it. No one would ever accuse the Sex Pistols of selling out . . . because they were trying to discourage tourism to the UK and encourage it to Ireland because they were paid for by the Irish Tourist Bureau. You understood they were just pissed off. There was a legitimate nihilism there. When companies are looking for buttons to push, are rage and anger easier buttons to push? Well, with this demographic, it might be. But when they're going to the 12-year-old girl market, then they're going to . . . come up with an 'N Sync or Backstreet Boys. It's all done by marketing, though. Clearly, you find the sorts of the things that work. . . . One of the ironies is that we think the commercial marketplace of ideas is going to satisfy all our needs, because it's in the interest of the marketers. In fact, it almost works the opposite way. Once you find something that works, everyone else apes it, and you just run it into the ground and everything else is forgotten. "Oh, Backstreet Boys works with 12-year-old girls?" Then you've got 500 Backstreet Boys. Now some rage thing works for 17-year-old white guys in the suburbs. Then you've got 500 people doing the same thing. So the marketplace, ironically, almost has this sort of monoculture built into it, because logically you're trying to always ape what worked last week. And you don't want to take chances. You lose your job when you take chances and it flops. No one's going to be fired for doing the second Backstreet Boys, but if you go out and do the first thing of something else . . . and that flops, then you're history. Now "Dawson's Creek" is going to have real issues in it. Is that a valid way to spread issues and real life and good content back to the masses? I guess I'd rather have "Dawson's Creek" deal with real issues than with inane issues. So I certainly would not discourage them from doing that. But is that going to ultimately be a successful way to really have a vibrant culture? Probably not. There's no evidence to think that, if the commercial logic that so dominates the content of these shows was at all in conflict with the idea of doing a show on an important issue, it's hard to believe that the issue would overwhelm the commercial logic. If, for example, a show with a girl having an abortion would antagonize a significant part of the base and hurt advertising sales, the track record is that it's just not going to be done, period. Take the classic case in the early 1980s, when they did the show "The Day After" or something about the nuclear war. They couldn't sell ads for it, but it had the highest ratings ever. So therefore you don't do shows about serious topics if it hurts the commercial imperative. And you haven't seen any more shows like that since then. But we've seen plenty of shows on JonBenet Ramsey and the "Long Island Lolita," because those things sell lots of ads. So there's a big difference between audience ratings and commercial viability? Sure, there can be. And it becomes circular, because basically, you're not given that choice of "The Day After" very often. You're never given a choice of a show about nuclear war just so you can really factor it in, except once every 10 or 20 years and it's an accident. So you're usually just picking from commercial choices. That's the range of things. So they said, "Well, everyone picked this," but they didn't have a choice of something without ads. They didn't have a choice of something on a topic that wouldn't be done for a commercial reason. That would be a legitimate survey, but then focus groups would never even ask that. There was a great piece by the Nation columnist, Christopher Hitchins, where he talks about how he was involved in one of these focus groups a few years ago for a primetime TV show. They were showing him a pilot for a new show with a bunch of other people, and they were supposed to rate it. They wanted to get opinions on it so they could tweak it a little bit to get it popular. And he said that, when you left, everyone in the group was pissed off, because it was such a circular thing. They were only asking certain types of questions. They never asked something like, "What do you think of the show in general?" It was always, "Well, what do you think of this character's haircut," or "Is that character's butt too big?" or "Is that joke funny enough?" But they just wanted to say, "We think the whole thing stinks. We'd like a show on something else," but that was off-limits. The focus group was only interested in what they could do to make money off of that investment, period. When GE runs NBC, is there more content that can't show up? How does corporate America's obvious focus . . . rob these young people? It's hard to answer that, because there are so many factors in people's lives to really evaluate, does it make kids happier and healthier or does it hurt them? Look at the American Pediatric Association, which is really young kids, or the American Psychological Association, when they do their studies. I think that the evidence is increasingly clear that being awash in sort of a commercial marination, as American children and teenagers are today, does not make happier people. The evidence is clear that we have a generation that's not especially happy, and it should be a troubling sign for all of us. It's a tough area, because there are so many other factors, you hesitate about sounding like a vulgar social critic. But in 1970, some sociologists did surveys of teenagers all over the world to see who were the happiest teenagers, who feel best about their world their lives. And the three groups of teenagers that were regarded as the happiest teenagers in the world in 1970 were in Israel, Cuba, and Chile. And those were highly non-commercial cultures--all three of them. It's interesting to look at Chile, because Chile at that time was a very democratic society. It had a very high rate of voter turnout. It was very political--the most political society, arguably, in the world-- certainly in the Third World. They had a coup d'etat, they established a free market economy, a so-called "free market economy," and they consciously tried to de-politicize the people when they reinstated democracy. Now it's a highly commercial culture. If you go to Chile, the middle class of Chile is conscious of brand-names. They don't know anything about politics. And now they've got one of the most depressed groups of teenagers. But it's considered a great victory in the New York Times and in our media, because it's a free society now. It's a democracy. But it's also a society where people aren't very happy, and it's a deeply troubled society, obsessed with brand-names. That's anecdotal evidence. I would never use that in the court of law to convict, but I think there is considerable evidence that this type of world does not produce happy people. This isn't really what people are meant to be--basically recipients of marketing messages to define themselves by purely commercial terms. And that really shouldn't surprise us. Look at every major religion, every theology. None of them would define a good life or a happy person on the basis of something as meaningless as their possessions, what they own, or how many more they own than someone else, or having a different brand-name. In fact, that really violates almost all our philosophical and moral notions of what a good person and a good life is; and for good reason, because it is a bogus life. What is the emotional-spiritual-ethical effect of having all of your authentic cultural artifacts sucked up into this machine? It really promotes the sort of world in which you don't think anything matters unless it serves you, unless it serves your material gain. Why be honest? Why have integrity? Why care about other people? That's for chumps. It's all about taking care of number one. The dominant institutions in society, the values they send out is, "We're just here to make money off of you. We're just here to take advantage of you." The message that goes out to everyone in that system is, "Yes, everyone should be everyone for themselves. Just take care of number one. Why should I care about that other person? What's in it for me?" And that's not a healthy environment for society. People are not islands. That's not new. We're social creatures. It creates very unhappy people when we stop caring about each other, when we just think what happens to us is all that matters. And kids can find something like the Insane Clown Posse experience and get camaraderie until it gets sucked back. . . . So the sales of the music go down and the label fires the band and creates a new band and probably their marketing says, "Now we've got to shift over to this technique." Do you care about big companies buying big companies and what effect there is on content? That side isn't really that important. What's happened in the media in the United States in the past 10 or 15 years, especially since about 1994 or 1995, has been an unprecedented concentration of ownership. So we have seven or eight companies now, which own these largest media companies. All are film studios. All are TV networks. Four of the five music companies that sell 90 percent of the music in the United States own almost all the TV stations in the largest markets. They're huge conglomerates, and this is really a new thing. It used to be that the largest media companies, 20 or 40 years ago, only produced newspapers, they only made movies, they only had a TV network. Now they're dominant players in each of these markets. They're highly non-competitive. They don't have to worry about a newcomer coming in. The barriers to entry, as economists talk about, are so high that basically, they've got a private club. It's a gentleman's club of about a half-dozen, seven, eight companies that really rule the thing. They're closely linked. They know each other. They have deals together. And what they're able to do with this tremendous power between them is hyper-commercialize their content without fear of competitive retribution. Radio is a classic case in point of how that works, and the company Viacom, which owns MTV, is a big player in this. In 1996, radio was deregulated by the federal government. This is public property, so the government has a right to say how many stations you're allowed to own. Well, in the 1996 Telecom Act, without a shred of debate in Congress or any hearings discussing it, the ownership restrictions were lifted on radio from 28 stations for one single company to as many as they wanted to own. And you were allowed to own up to eight in the largest markets. Overnight, over half these stations in America were sold from small companies to big companies, and big companies to huge ones.

So you have a handful of companies like Viacom that now dominate American radio. Every market now usually has two or three companies that dominate it, that own almost all the stations and sell relevant advertising. What's happened to American radio is a classic case, then, of this hyper-commercialism, on one hand. The amount of advertising on American radio today is 18 minutes per hour. It's something like 50 percent more than the early 1990s, because these companies don't have to worry about competition. Two or three of them own all the stations. They don't have to worry about someone coming in doing eight minutes an hour and stealing away their listeners. So it gets hyper-commercialized.

in Sweden they allow no advertising to children under 12 as the condition of broadcasting. You can't advertise there to children under 12. The public has a right to do that here. We have a right to set real limits on the amount of advertising and commercialism that reach people under 18. We have the constitutional and moral right to do that

There are two types of media literacy. There's the type that actually teaches you how the system works, what advertisers are trying to do, so you learn to understand it to be a critical participant. Then there's the type that the media companies want to do, which is basically to train you to like certain types of shows, but not to question the system. Get real media literacy done by honest intellectuals and academics, not by PR people for the media companies and the ad industry. That can help, too. Make people aware of what to do.

The great communication theorist Marshall McLuhan has a wonderful line about commercialism. He says, "We don't know who discovered water, but it probably wasn't a fish." And one of the problems with commercialism is that we're so immersed in it, at a certain point, we lose our ability to see it critically.

The Nation is the print publication that might be described as the spiritual center of leftist of media criticism. It ran a special issue on the theme in a recent year.

The Theme of Media Concentration
Here.

The Nation: Mark Crispin Miller article, January 2002, and profiles/chart of top ten media conglomerates.

A third analyst is Douglas Rushkoff, a professor of media culture at New York University and the author of several books on new media and popular culture.

there's sort of this interruptive advertising or what we can call "intercept advertising", [that] starts appearing everywhere. So that now a kid goes to school and is watching educational Channel One television in the classroom and he's getting advertised for sneakers and junk food and fast food and stuff that's particularly noxious for him.

It's gotten to the point, I think, where almost anywhere a kid sets his eyes he's gonna be marketed to. Someone's trying to program a decision of one kind or another. Now whether he's looking at a bus or looking at a phone booth or going to a club or looking at his own feet there's marketing going on everywhere. So that the only choice for a kid is to close his eyes or to come up with strategies for defending against those messages. ...

what marketers now call "diffusion marketing", is when you find the coolest kid in a social group, basically pay him off to wear your sneakers or your t-shirt or your perfume or buy your cell phone, whatever it is. And then hopefully this sort of the pyramid social group under him will then aspire to have those products as well. ... The sick thing about it is that it works. It works if you actually find the right people. ...

What people want is a rest. They want a moment of free time and of genuine free time. And there's no more public space left to do that in. There is no more free space left. We've had a real contraction of public space both mentally and in the media and in the real world, where there's nowhere to go where you're not being marketed to.... Douglas Rushkoff is a professor of media culture at New York University and the author of several books on new media and popular culture. He is the correspondent for FRONTLINE's "The Merchants of Cool." ...How pervasive has the stream of messages become that kids are exposed to as they grow up? Well, there have always been traditional windows of opportunity to reach young people with messages -- you know, television, radio, records, and all that. And the more limited that real estate is, the more expensive that real estate becomes. So more clever advertisers sought new venues to interrupt kids in places where they might not normally expect to see an advertisement. It's as simple as seeing, you know, "Got Milk?" on the banana or a sticker that shows up on your skate board or a banner ad on the Internet or interstitial advertising for products on Playstation games. So there's sort of this interruptive advertising or what we can call "intercept advertising", [that] starts appearing everywhere. So that now a kid goes to school and is watching educational Channel One television in the classroom and he's getting advertised for sneakers and junk food and fast food and stuff that's particularly noxious for him. It's gotten to the point, I think, where almost anywhere a kid sets his eyes he's gonna be marketed to. Someone's trying to program a decision of one kind or another. Now whether he's looking at a bus or looking at a phone booth or going to a club or looking at his own feet there's marketing going on everywhere. So that the only choice for a kid is to close his eyes or to come up with strategies for defending against those messages. ... ...How is demographic market research reductionist by nature? Treating an age group as a demographic requires coming up with something that's common to every single one of them. Right? ... So it's reductionist in that it reduces an entire segment of civilization down to one person with one habit. And it's ultimately ineffective because if you're talking to a mass of people as if they are this one person, there's always going to be something about that they can't identify with. So [how does it affect] the kid? The effect of reduction on the consumer is a need to conform. If you are not fitting into the customer profile of the company that you like, then you need to change yourself so you're more like that profile. And the interesting thing about where it's gotten today is in order to push consumerism to the max, everyone has to have their own thing, right? ... So in America we're individuals. We each make our own consumer choices. I can buy my own jeans in my own size, in my own style. And we stress individuality above all. The odd little ironic twist in it now is we all conform through our nonconformity. We all conform to the template of, "I am me. I buy my Sprite." It doesn't matter which of these sodas you buy because they're all made by Coca-Cola. You just buy the one that is you, that says you. ... Talk about this notion of kids following what's "cool". Cool hunting, or what marketers now call "diffusion marketing", is when you find the coolest kid in a social group, basically pay him off to wear your sneakers or your t-shirt or your perfume or buy your cell phone, whatever it is. And then hopefully this sort of the pyramid social group under him will then aspire to have those products as well. ... The sick thing about it is that it works. It works if you actually find the right people. ... What are your views on media-marketing executives following around after kids, watching the way they behave, in the search for this ephemeral "cool kid." The truly absurd thing about the hunt for the cool kid is really what's going on is executives want to feel cool themselves. So they pursue the sort of alternative kid, the skate boarder, computer hacker, cyber punk, psychographic kid because they think, "Well, that's the leading trend." In fact, almost no trends from the indie crowd end up getting; picked up by Mainstream America. ... All this stuff ends up being fringe, all the cool stuff. Rave culture, you know, however much I love it and however much I think it could help, you know, unite the globe, it's a fringe cultural phenomenon. Kids are still listening to rock music and five-boy vocal bands and rap and hip-hop. So the true absurdity of the cool hunting is that it's a real dead end for these people. It's a bunch of Baby Boomers trying to feel cool again and end up targeting their stuff to a demographic that actually is not big enough to be worth their time. ... What about the point that kids are hip to what marketers are doing and they have a response to this. ...It is an arms race. It's a coercive arms race where we develop a defense mechanism, so they develop a counter measure. So we develop a new defense mechanism, they develop a new counter measure, and then everybody's just watching the other suspiciously to see who's trying to program who... If you put all these things together, the whole goal seems to be to make marketing almost invisible, a 360 degree wall around a kid, such that where reality starts and marketing begins becomes ever more obscure and difficult to find, so that the goal is for kids to grow up not seeing the marketing around them. ... Kids are moving through a reality in which they're being marketed to 24-7. It's almost to the point where it's in their sleep or certainly on their bed sheets. The danger of that is that kids don't know that anything is not marketing. It's as if the only kinds of choices we understand are consumer choices. So you look online, say, in a place which is supposed to [have] created the possibility for a revolution of some kind, [a] revolution of ideas. And what sort of revolutions do we see there? Napster. You know what? Napster is a consumer revolt. Napster is about my right to have this music and to share if I've paid for it. You know, so we start to see our decisions, our opportunities, our every choice is a consumer choice. And even the greatest people's advocate, a guy like Ralph Nader, what is he? He's a consumer advocate. So the radical lefty now is someone who's going to improve our consumer choice. So it's a little disconcerting... What people want is a rest. They want a moment of free time and of genuine free time. And there's no more public space left to do that in. There is no more free space left. We've had a real contraction of public space both mentally and in the media and in the real world, where there's nowhere to go where you're not being marketed to....

If you live in a world where everywhere you look you're being marketed to, and where an increasing amount of your time is spent in mediated spaces, whether on [the] Internet or on TV, there's a kind of a counter drive that emerges, which is a quest for authenticity, a quest for the real. In kids that'll take the form of extreme sports and rave and mosh pits and stuff that feels tactile and real. Even if you get hurt, it's real blood. It's something. That's why all these, you know, little white kids in the suburbs are trying to look like they're gangsta hip-hop kids, because at least in the city it seems like it's real. There's real violence, real drugs, real threat. For adults it becomes, you know, "Let's go to the South Street Seaport or the Quincy Market in Boston, because it's a historical site. So we can take our child to, you know, Ye Olde Kite Shoppe instead of Toys R Us and they'll have an authentic experience." Of course, all these authentic experiences are generated as well. The marketer's greatest tool now is simulated authenticity. You think you're getting this real thing, so ...

Here's the story as I see it. Since the 1960s, mainstream media has searched out and co-opted the most authentic things it could find in youth culture, whether that was psychedelic culture, anti-war culture, blue jeans culture. Eventually heavy metal culture, rap culture, electronica -- they'll look for it and then market it back to kids at the mall. And the original kids who are doing it feel really upset about that, because they thought they had found something cool and now it's available at the mall, and now the kids who are participating in it are actually just putting more money into Sony and Time Warner and big corporations. It's a limited view of what's happening, but an honest one and it's something to kind of be upset about, because the idea was to create something that stayed genuine, that stayed the output of teenagers, the output of youth rather than something that's about the consumption by youth. And that's really the big difference: is this our expression or is this our purchase?

So the last great one seemed to be grunge music. It was independent record labels. It was done by local bands in local places. And then this Nirvana phenomenon happened where Nirvana -- who was sort of the best of the grunge bands -- ends up getting picked up by mainstream record labels, sold on MTV and going unplugged there and becoming a mainstream group, ending in the suicide of Kurt Cobain, which, whether or not he was depressed and whether or not he was a drug addict, represented to those of us who felt like we are part of the grunge movement, represented the suicide of the grunge movement. [It] represented Kurt Cobain communicating to all of us, "I've been sucked into the system. I'm part of the borg. The only thing I can do now to prevent my stuff from being used that way is suicide." And it's real. I mean that's the only thing we know about life, right? Death and taxes. You know, so death, this is real. It's the last real thing that he could do, because everything else was becoming part of the fake media world.

Since then, I think the relationship between authentic youth cultural happenings and youth culture consumption is indistinguishable. I think that kids who are on "The Real World" are kids who've aspired to be on MTV their whole lives. They've learned how to behave by watching MTV. So that now when MTV takes a bunch of them and puts them in a house and puts a camera on them, they're not putting a camera in the real world. They are photographing people who've been programmed how to behave by MTV. So where is the reality in the equation? The reality is the introduction of media into this equation. The reality is the media. So that we end up reaching an abstracted form of authenticity that is authentic for the very fact that it's mediated consumptive marketing pulp. The reality itself, the tapestry of reality is composed of media iconography. That is the new plane of reality for these people.

So we're in an interesting moment now where because corporations are not really alive, because corporations are really programmed to increase the bottom line by any means necessary

[Note: Lots of good sense from Rushkoff, but this last part is false, Marxist ideology. Jew Ben Stein points out in The View from Sunset Boulevard that Hollywood forgoes profits to produce agitprop that makes the producers feel good. If profits were all that mattered, corporations -- which actively sell to the homosexual segment -- would target the White community, as VNN does.]

The people who are empowered in that environment are people who produce imagery rather than just consume it. So Eminem, for my money, is in an empowered situation. Whether he can use his pulpit to actually transform people, to change the discussion, is left to be seen. Now I don't see that currently, but I do see a real mastery of language on his part, and an ability to create dense structures of socially provocative ideas. Let's see where he takes that as he grows up.

in the early '90s I came up with this idea called "media virus". And the idea was that ideas themselves pass through the media space like viruses and that things that ended up getting passed around the most are things that are unrecognizable. Just like your body, when it doesn't recognize a virus, it can't fight it, it doesn't have the antigens, doesn't have the immune response to it. When something pops up that's unrecognizable -- like the Rodney King tape was or a weird Calvin Klein advertisement that your brain goes, "Huh," -- that thing will pass around. So in that sense things spread just for being new, just for being loud, just for being absurd.

But what happens is if we're then in a culture where the loudest thing gets attention, then everyone starts competing to be the loudest or the wildest or the weirdest.

Children are being adultified because our economy is depending on them to make purchasing decisions. So they're essentially the victims of a marketing and capitalist machine gone awry. You know, we need to expand, expand, expand. There is no such thing as enough in our current economic model and kids are bearing the brunt of that. ... So they're isolated, they're alone, they're desperate. It's a sad and lonely feeling. ...

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govt concerned with media

Department of Justice- Antitrust Division
Assistant Attorney General Joel I. Klein
950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
(202) 514-2007
antitrust@usdoj.gov

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GLOBAL CONGLOMERATES

AOL Time Warner
AT&T
Bertelsmann
Disney
General Electric
News Corporation
Viacom
Vivendi
Sony
Liberty Media
Here.

News Corp. (Fox)

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Viacom Inc.
2000: $20 billion company with 130,000 employees operating in 100 countries.

Jew Sumner Redstone, Chairman & CEO
Jew Mel Karmazin, president and COO

RichardBressler,44 CFO, Sr. Exec. VP
MichaelFricklas, 42 Exec. VP, Gen. Counsel, Sec.
William Roskin,59 Sr. VP of HR and Admin.

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CORPORATE HISTORY

1994 -- bought Paramount Communications and Blockbuster Video

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What kind of men lead Viacom?

Summner Redstone profile...
Here.

Mr. Redstone enjoys and takes pride in teaching college men and women. He is affiliated with Harvard Law School and Brandeis University, where he is a Visiting Professor.

VISION OF FUTURE

If Redstone seems optimistic, it is because he sees Viacom's future in supplying the growing demand for American pop culture from newly emerging global markets. "Take, for example, the studio business," he says. "When you see "Mission Impossible" doing $180 million in the United States and $250 million overseas, you see the growth that takes place overseas. Or let me give it to you from an exhibitor's standpoint. National Amusements is building right now in Chile and Argentina. Would you believe that there is only one five-screen multiplex in all of South America? There's an insatiable demand for American product, American entertainment and, indeed, information all over the world. The growth that's going to take place in the future is going to be far more overseas than here."

compare with Mark Crispin Miller's...
US newspaper conglomerates--the New York Times, the Washington Post, Gannett, Knight-Ridder and the Tribune Co.--will soon be formal partners with, say, GE, Murdoch, Disney and/or AT&T; and then the lesser nationwide chains (and the last few independents) will be ingested, too, going the way of most US radio stations. America's cities could turn into informational "company towns," with one behemoth owning all the local print organs--daily paper(s), alternative weekly, city magazine--as well as the TV and radio stations, the multiplexes and the cable system.

See his man Todd Cunninham's -- Sr VP of strategy and planning -- view of the future here.

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Viacom is a leading global media company, with preeminent positions in broadcast and cable television, radio, outdoor advertising, and online. With programming that appeals to audiences in every demographic category across virtually all media, the company is a leader in the creation, promotion, and distribution of entertainment, news, sports, and music. Viacom's well-known brands include CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, BET, Paramount Pictures, Viacom Outdoor, Infinity, UPN, TNN: The National Network, CMT: Country Music Television, Showtime, Blockbuster, and Simon & Schuster.

BROADCAST AND CABLE TELEVISION

The CBS Television Network of more than 200 affiliated stations provides viewers some of the nation's best entertainment, news, and sports programming. Popular programs include Everybody Loves Raymond, the Late Show with David Letterman, and 60 Minutes. Sports franchises include the NFL and the NCAA Basketball Championship. Daytime drama The Young and the Restless leads a daytime programming lineup that has been No. 1 for more than 12 years.

MTV Networks owns and operates many of the most popular basic cable television programming services, including MTV: Music Television, the world's most widely distributed television network, reaching almost 400 million households in 164 countries and territories; Nickelodeon, which is seen in over 300 million households worldwide via localized channels, branded blocks, and individual programs; VH1 reaching over 96 million households around the world; and TNN, which serves 87 million homes in North America with the tops in pop culture programming. Other services include MTV2, Nick at Nite, TV Land, CMT, and The Digital Suite from MTV Networks. MTVN is also involved in a variety of entertainment businesses that extend its brands, including films, books, online, and consumer products.

BET is comprised of Black Entertainment Television, the largest national cable network serving African Americans, reaching 67 million U.S. households; BET on Jazz: The Jazz Channel, the country's only 24-hour network devoted to jazz music; BET's publishing unit, BET Books; BET Pictures, which produces made-for-TV movies and documentaries; and BET.com, the leading online destination for African Americans.

Paramount Television is one of the largest suppliers of television programming for the broadcast, first-run syndication, and cable markets, with over 55,000 hours of programming in its library. Its six production units are Paramount Network Television, Viacom Productions, Spelling Television, Big Ticket Television, Paramount Domestic Television, and Paramount International Television.

CBS Enterprises is a global leader in distribution. Its domestic syndication arm, King World Productions Inc., sells first-run programming such as Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy!, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Its off-network slate includes the hit CBS series Everybody Loves Raymond. Outside the U.S., CBS Broadcast International is one of the premier distributors of U.S. network series programming, while its subsidiary King World International Productions is a leader in format sales and local production worldwide.

The United Paramount Network (UPN) reaches more than 86% of U.S. television homes through its affiliated stations, and broadcasts ten hours of original, primetime programming each week. Popular programs include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Enterprise the latest installment in the Star Trek franchise, and Roswell

. Showtime Networks Inc. (SNI) owns the premium television networks Showtime, The Movie Channel, and FLIX. SNI operates and manages the premium television network Sundance Channel, which is owned by SNI, Robert Redford, and Universal Studios. SNI also markets and distributes sports and entertainment events for exhibition to subscribers on a pay-per-view basis.

The Viacom Television Stations Group consists of 34 television stations, reaching 9 of the top 10 television markets in the United States. The Division includes 16 owned-and-operated CBS stations and 18 UPN-affiliated stations. The CBS Television Stations Division includes duopolies in seven major markets, with CBS and UPN stations in Philadelphia, Boston, Dallas, Detroit, Miami, and Pittsburgh.

Comedy Central, the country's only all-comedy network, is jointly owned by Viacom and HBO and presents the biggest comedy stars from the past and present along with today's hottest newcomers.

Viacom Plus is the company's integrated sales and marketing arm. The group's mission is to create long-term marketing partnerships that build brands and drive revenue for both clients and the company.

RADIO AND OUTDOOR

Infinity Broadcasting is the radio and outdoor advertising unit of Viacom. Infinity Radio, the unit's radio division, operates over 180 radio stations, the majority of which are in the nation's largest markets. Infinity also manages and holds an equity position in Westwood One, Inc.

Viacom Outdoor, Infinity's outdoor advertising division, has properties across North America and Europe, including the top 100 markets in the U.S.

MOTION PICTURES AND THEATRICAL EXHIBITION

Paramount Pictures, one of the original major motion picture studios, has been a leading producer and distributor of feature films since 1912. Its more than 2,500-title library includes Oscar winners such as Forrest Gump, Braveheart, and Titanic (the highest-grossing motion picture of all time) and recent releases Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius; Vanilla Sky; and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.

Paramount Home Entertainment, a global leader in the distribution of filmed entertainment on videocassette and DVD, distributes theatrical releases from Paramount Pictures, Paramount Classics, Nickelodeon Movies, and MTV Films as well as non-theatrical releases both in the U.S. and abroad. Recent successes include Save the Last Dance and What Women Want.

Famous Players, founded in 1920, is Canada's top-grossing, fastest-growing and longest-operating theatrical exhibitor. The Toronto-based company offers audiences the best possible theatrical film experience through its 102 locations with 884 screens throughout Canada, including theaters in its joint venture with IMAX and its partnership with Alliance Atlantis.

United International Pictures (UIP), in which Viacom has a 33% interest, handles general distribution of Paramount Pictures' films outside the United States and Canada.

United Cinemas International (UCI), a joint venture between Viacom and Universal, operates approximately 970 screens in 113 theaters in the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Austria, Spain, Japan, Italy, Taiwan, Poland, Argentina, Brazil, and Panama, and is one of the largest operators of multiplex theaters outside the United States.

Viacom Consumer Products is a leader in the entertainment licensing arena, merchandising properties on behalf of Paramount Pictures, Paramount Television, Viacom Productions, and Spelling Television, as well as third-party properties.

Famous Music Publishing is one of the top ten music publishers in the United States and one of the world's major suppliers of music to all mediums. Its diversified catalog of over 100,000 copyrights spans seven decades and includes music from Oscar-winning motion pictures such as The Godfather, Forrest Gump, and Titanic as well as every genre of contemporary music, including hits written or recorded by Blondie, Bush, Montell Jordan, Garth Brooks, Ricky Martin, Eric Clapton, Whitney Houston, and Barbra Streisand.

VIDEO

Blockbuster is the world's leading renter of videos, DVDs, and video games with nearly 7,800 stores throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia. More than 3 million customers visit a Blockbuster store each day.

INTERNET

MTV.com is one of the leading music entertainment destinations on the Web, giving fans unlimited access and an intimate connection to their favorite artists, shows and other fans. The site delivers unparalleled online programming with popular features like Radio MTV.com, MTVNews.com and unique community features including MTV member profiles, instant messaging and more.

CBS.com and CBSNews.com, CBS's branded online offerings, promote and complement on-air programming, including Survivor, CSI, Everybody Loves Raymond, and 60 Minutes.

Nickelodeon Online is the leading portfolio of kids and parents' destinations, featuring Nick.com, Nickjr.com, nick-at-nite.com, tvland.com, teachers.nick.com, and gas.nick.com.

Viacom Interactive Ventures manages an Internet portfolio that includes equity relationships with over a dozen Web sites, including CBS.MarketWatch.com, CBS.SportsLine.com, Hollywood.com, Switchboard.com, and the free-cash Internet portal iWon.com.

VH1.com is a leading online destination for new music, entertainment and artist information while serving as the online extension for the network's news and entertainment programming and its award-winning community-based initiative VH1 Save the Music.

PUBLISHING

Simon & Schuster publishes more than 2,100 titles annually under 38 well-known trade, mass market, children's, and new media imprints. The division published 99 New York Times Best Sellers in 2001, including 14 at No. 1.

PARKS

Paramount Parks is one of the largest theme park companies in the world and entertains approximately 13 million visitors annually at its five North American theme parks and interactive attraction Star Trek: The Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton.

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MTV

Judy McGrath, President

David Sirulnick, MTV executive vice president for news & production


Brian Graden, MTV executive vice president for news & production


We'll do focus groups where we'll bring 12 trend-setting kids together to talk about things over coffee, or other qualitative exercises like this to find out, what are the emergent trends? What do they think is cool? What are the forces that shape them? Why? The implicit promise of MTV has always been that we see things honestly from your POV.

Another thing we've seen is that their parents have moved up on the heroes list. It used to be number five or six when you'd asked them to list their heroes. Now, very often, the parents are number one. So you have a generation of post-divorce-trend parents trying, perhaps, to invest a little more and do a better job. I think that speaks volumes about this particular generation.

And they're very much into expressing their own taste. . . . They have trended toward tiny personal expressions, whether it's through mysticism, or different kinds of spirituality, that they can find a personal expression and a kind of serenity. They accept diversity much more than we did.

Note: very perceptive and interesting. What he can't say is that these kids are without any common sense because the jews destroyed it. When you preach diversity, you can hardly expect unity. Since racial unity is outlawed among the majority, it turns to fallbacks in mysticism and consumerism. "Tiny personal expression" reminds me of something from German Lit class, a period called "Biedermeyer," in which people turned inward after hopes of revolution were thwarted. All the Vital Decisions are taken by Jews; what's left is what to eat, what to buy, what to screw. MTV has sugggestions.]

Qualitative: What is MTV trying to do?
The research efforts at MTV are certainly legendary. Ever since the very beginning, there's been a kind of feverish addiction to research and understanding young people. ... early on, before MTV even had ratings, a big part of what separated MTV from the pack of the other competitors out there was its knowledge of the audience ... We do more than 200 focus groups a year. ... See the whole interview here.
Note: Does MTV create or respond? Both, in an interplay....]

The consumer who is 18 years old is infinitely harder to hold, and to even get their attention in the first case. How do you do it? ... If you sign up to work at MTV as an executive, you pretty much sign up to care deeply about what it's like to be 21 years old, and to see the world from their point of view and to celebrate the art that they celebrate--celebrate the musicians.

when you're in a position of being of MTV, you receive 200 videos a week to look at. And I think that that tends to be about the first place where certain ideas and certain thoughts of a generation begin to show up. You're absolutely right to say that . . . the edge, the attitude, is expressing something, and it's an undercurrent that is harder, that seems to be angry. At MTV, we are absolutely in a constant internal discussion about our role in the media. I would say that MTV works on two levels. We see ourselves as champion of artists. And whether we like it or not, the themes that artists sometimes choose to embrace reflect sometimes anger, sometimes views that we would never agree with. For the most part, we aren't going to censor the artist, beyond standard television network standards. As MTV, we do believe that we have some broader role in educating consumers, in getting behind social campaigns like our campaign to vote, our campaign to stop violence. So we tried to make both coexist on the channel. Artists can express themselves, but so can we. I can't help but be worried that we are throwing so much at young adults so fast. And there is no amount of preparation or education or even love that you could give a child to be ready. on occasion we, because we're on MTV, will go out on a limb and say, "You know what? There's no evidence that this artist is going to break yet, but we're just going to go out on a limb and make . . . the artist buzz-worthy." Todd Cunningham


Cunningham is MTV Senior Vice President of Brand Strategy and Planning. He outlines MTV's research efforts to understand teens, including their Ethnography and Sources of Gold studies. He also discusses how MTV seeks out "bleeding edge" youth groups, and why its philosophy is both to lead and reflect youth culture.

the first turnstile that we must adhere to at all times--that anything that we do has to be relevant to the viewer. So many times we hear so many young people complain, and many adults as well, that they watch TV or they interact with any medium and they think, "What does this have to do with me?" We believe that . . . we're able to bring that to life on air, be it through the real world or things like that. We understand the kinds of products that they're actually using. We're able to actually translate that on air in terms of set design, in terms of subjects that people talk about, the issues they're grappling with as well. That's the way that works for us. . "Sources of Gold" was the name of the study that we're talking about. Probably about eight years ago or so . . . most trends came from places like New York and L.A. Most of the people who worked for MTV were from New York and L.A. Many of them were very young trendsetter types, leading-edge kind of young people. We've seen the competitive landscape get more crowded. We've also seen trends start to come from places within the US, from places like Austin, Seattle, San Diego and Nashville. And it became apparent to us that we needed to better understand that cut of the marketplace, because MTV had always been a trailblazer, a trendsetter type of brand. In order to kind of hold onto that, it was important for us to stay in touch with that, and make sure that we were cognizant of those type of things. Fast-forward about five years. Now we're seeing that trends come from even more obscure places than even those cities that I've just mentioned. So within that, we actually embarked on some trendsetter types of studies, more leading-edge youth studies. This study was the first one we had attacked globally, because MTV is a global brand in over 350 million households. And being the number one global media brand, it was important for us to hold onto that and make sure that we were relevant. So we embarked on a study called "Sources of Gold," to basically understand the sources that young people today identify with the most, whether it be people, places, things, attitudes, that we would understand. So we went to 18 cities around the world and talked to young people, leading-edge thinkers and tastemakers and stylemakers that we identified, to find out what they thought about what their lives were like. Then, eventually, we would talk to them about MTV, but it was more about cultural exchange of information. We believe that MTV is, and always has been, the platform, the place, the destination, where young people come, where teenagers come to express themselves and to see themselves reflected on air. I would say that our philosophy is both leading and reflecting. There are many times where it's important for us that, in terms of keeping our edge and making sure that we're seen as leading-edge brand, that we oftentimes will lead with certain things that maybe much of the mainstream hasn't embraced yet. But we know for a fact, through our research and through the smart people who actually work on the brand, that we're going take the risk and we're there. There are many times also that we're reflective. So the use of the word "mirroring" is maybe not necessarily . . . If we put a phrase on it, "feedback loop" would work. I think that it is not as conventional as a conventional loop might be. There are times when we get feedback, and we're actually not ready to bring it back internally. We need to go back and prove some hypotheses, or we need to go and test some other things, or just better understand what they're about and then bring it internally and share with them. ////////////////////////////
AOL Time Warner

Interscope

Jimmy Iovine is the co-chairman of Interscope Records which started as a small alternative label in 1989 and grew into a powerful international music company. Its roster includes Eminem, Limp Bizkit and Marilyn Manson.



Usually, musicians have the best sense of where the culture is moving, rather than the producers. It's a very different thing than the TV business or the movie business. So we listen to the musicians a lot.

I think it's really big. Remember, there's an entire generation of young kids that were brought up on hip hop. And yet they like rock music from their older brother or their friend. So hip hop does a few things. Rap music. But one of the main things it does is the beats are extraordinary. . . . If you were a rock band with this sense of beat, with the sense of feel or the sense of tempo, you infiltrate their world. So what happened was a lot of these bands are coming at you with a hip hop feel, with rock instrumentals, and are really connecting in a big way. One reason is the beat.

The second reason is the attitude, the overall look of it and the feel of it. And it's meant a lot to young black America and white America. It's brought black and white together in our in our young communities. I see I see it literally every day. I see it in my house. I see it in my sister's house. I see it everywhere. For the young kid, it isn't like music in the 1960s and the 1950s, where you listened to the music, but it was a separate culture. These cultures are merging now through our young people.

hip hop was music of the kids. They demanded it, believe me. The industry did not want it to happen. The industry did not state, "Let's get into the hip hop business or the rap business." That was absolutely not the case. The kids drove that movement.

Note: As with MTV execs, the insistence is that the demand pull is as great or greater than the supply push. The jews would hardly need to control media were that the case. Are the people demanding violent negro stupidity? Are the people demanding Semitical Correctness? Did country music fans demand an absolute end to songs touching on female cheating, lying or any other kind of guilt?]

There's just no way to stop a movement in popular culture. It's going to happen, with or without you. There's absolutely no way to stop that train.

You said there's no way to stop the train. But are you the caboose on the train, or are you the engine of the train?

We're absolutely not the engine. Absolutely not. If we were the engine, we'd have a lot easier job. We're not the engine. The engine is the kids, what's going on in the country, what they see on television, what they see on the news, what they see in their homes. And then one of them can sing. And one of them can write. And one of them can make a college film. And then he's plugged into the nerve. Bob Dylan was maybe different than every kid that he grew up with. But he wasn't that different, you know. John Lennon was different than other kids in England at the time. But he wasn't that different.

There are thousands of Eminems. Just listen to a song. There are thousands of them. It's just that he had the talent. It's like someone with a talent to hit a baseball. He had the talent to write lyrics.

If I use the television as a babysitter, I'm asking for it, right? What do you expect someone to do? What do you think they're doing with everything from religion to candy to politics? It's all sold in the same way, or with the same amount of force, enthusiasm, sound, and subliminal effects. It's the same amount of indirect or direct assault. It's all sold the same way.

So I'm not offended by it. I believe that you are in control of your family. You have to cast you wife right. You have to cast your life right. You have to be in control of your family as much as you can be, and do the best you can. Not everyone has that luxury--not a luxury--but even has the will to do it.

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MEN

CNN founder Ted Turner
CBS president Lawrence Tisch
Rupert Murdoch of News Corp.

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AMERICA

US newspaper conglomerates

New York Times
Washington Post
Gannett
Knight-Ridder
Tribune Co.

A) publications/writers

National Review Online

Note that the commentariat is completely dominated by jews. Nobody openly critical of jews can be published in a major paper or talk on tv. That's the single most important fact to understand about our "free press." The non-jews that are published are mostly suckpoops, and very heavily East Coast Catholic suckpoops, further to break it down.

suckpoops and other non-jews William F. Buckley Jr. -- Catholic founder, Yalie, turns to Podhoretzim for final call on matters editorial; clipped conism at the outset by forbidding all jew-crit
John Derbyshire -- suckpoop of British origin, married to Chinese
Victor Davis Hanson -- suckpoop warmonger
Florence King -- satirist, wit, older lesbian, doesn't do tv, likes jews
Deroy Murdock -- black neocon
Dave Shiflett -- Southern/rural flavor, good guy, but definitely pro-Israel, not really a warmonger though.
Byron York - investigative writer
Andrew Stuttaford
Dinesh D'Souza - Indian, Catholic, big pusher of america-the-idea, ripped off jared taylor ideas without citing him for his book "End of Racism"
Kate O'Beirne - Catholic suckpoop, talking head, columnist
John O'Sullivan - Catholic, British, ex. editor
Michael Novak - Catholic suckpoop, apologist for capitalism
Jews

Rod Dreher
Jonah Goldberg - pudgy son of Lucianne, drives through Texas trying to imagine foreign invasion. can't.
Dave Kopel
Larry Kudlow
Stanley Kurtz
Michael Ledeen -- neocon warmonger, believe he's a jew
Mark R. Levin
Rich Lowry - warmonger, may be a jew
John J. Miller
Stephen Moore
Jay Nordlinger -- jew
John Podhoretz - son of founding neocon Norman and Midge Decter, israel-is-perfect neocon warmonger
Front Page Magazine

Lowell Ponte
Mark Riebling
Evelyn Gordon
Chris Weinkopf -- apparently german, not jewish, but a complete suckpoop from harvard, classic jerk-job writer, can't get to the bottom of anything
Robert Locke -- one of few non jews writing for horowitz's frontpage, uses racialist arguments against immigration, but never mentions jewish root
Mackubin Thomas Owens -- warmonger suckpoop
Michelle Malkin -- pinay neocon, model-minority diversity republican, better than most
L. Gordon Crovitz
Henry Mark Holzer
Jamie Glazov -- obnoxious jew who pretends he isn't. jewish, that is. first neocon to publicly come out against home-schooling, openly hates whites
Dana Hull
Ann Coulter -- "face" columnist Reps favor these days. drooling warmonger, as bad as gary bauer in uring all enemies of israel destroyed.
Mark Goldblatt
Jeff Jacoby -- shovel-nosed-turtle-faced jew hypocrite who writes for Boston Globe as their house neocon.
Larry Elder -- black con, pushes same sapless pap as the rest of the yaps
Myles Kantor -- jew working his way up the ladder through the jewish connection -- wrote for rockwell, then frontpage, now national review
Marc Levin
David Horowitz -- jew, ed. of frontpagemag; as sixties commie sent his friend to the black panthers where she was promptly murdered; warm-up run for what he's now trying to do as "conservative" to white race. one of zog's pillars because he provides a plausible fake opposition that attracts many whites who might otherwise wake up to the real nature of the racial game being played. he encourages Reps to reach out to minorities while disparaging whites who unite as whites.
John Leo
David A. Yeagley -- redskin con, fleshing out their rainbow menagerie
Michael P. Tremoglie
L. Brent Bozell -- catholic media critic afraid to say "jew"; classic jerk-jobbist; gets up every morning eager beaver to prove media bias
Richard Poe -- jew pogrebsky who stole anglo name. ex-frontpage editor, has own site
Cliff Kincaid -- anothe semitically correct media analyst
Michael Ledeen
Matt Welch -- smart young thing, posts self-pic on own site in his cowboy hat, which is real cute when you're five. unless he is a cowboy. maybe he just likes cowboys.
David Harsanyi
Daniel Pipes
Roger Clegg
Brendan Miniter
Johan Norberg
Charles Krauthammer -- feeb jew warmonger would kill every arab if he could
Tom Wood
Thomas Sowell -- only genuine black intellectual in the country. afraid to criticize jews. remarkable blind spot in light of his willingness to face facts elsewhere. sticks to semitically safe line that jews are hated for their virtues rather than their actions and behavior. in anyone else, sheer suckpoopery. in his case, probably just a blind spot.
John Perazzo
Andrew Sullivan -- tiresome british queer "conservative" who runs a weblog when he's not injecting himself with male hormones or tonight's boyfriend with infected cock; a warmongering literal suckpoop who badly needs to shut up for a couple decades until his AIDS can silence him for good
Wendy McElroy -- sky-pie libertarian dreamer who shrinks from biology like a fishworm
Lewrockwell.com

Jeff Elkins
Joe Sobran -- perhaps the best mainstream writer; mild and pointed at once; top-notch epigrammatist whose 'an anti-semite is someone jews hate' makes me kermit-green. wrote boringly evidential book proving shakespeare was fag earl of oxford. one of a handful whose authority is genuine. catholic who chooses not to apply his principles to his sect or to chrisitianity as a whole. may change, as he took 20 years to apply conservative principles to israel. when he did nervous buckley fired him from national review. He said of conservatism he then realized 'it was all a game, a way of making a living.' The smartest con of his generation says that -- don't doubt it.
Paul Craig Roberts -- no one with three names can be entirely trustworthy. PCR is another guy who will give you everything but what matters. he will name fifteen causes but never tell you the jew truth. for that reason he has become known as Semitically Correct roberts between my ears.
Reed Irvine -- looks like a lizard because he has spent his entire career proving things that require no proof. what part of self-evident do you not understand, bud?
LEFTISTS Richard Cohen -- classic jewish shmuck who has a job solely because, well, if they hired competent, funny, intelligent, free, White writers to write their opinion columns they wouldn't be the washington post
Robert Scheer -- jew whose kid started a paper in prague after the revolution.
Chris Floyd
James Ostrowski
Murray Rothbard -- jew, very good writer, but dead. somewhat similar to jew paul gottfried in that would never name the jewish root of the problems he described and denounced.
Walter Block
Diane Alden -- quintessential dumb-bitch type who writes articles denouncing the "germans" and their dastardly frankfurt school, probably without ever realizing they were all kikes. but, even if she did realize it, she wouldn't say it because she's operating on the paycheck principle, and her ilk is uniformly composed of suckpoops and moral cowards. looks out of eye-sides to see what sells, hers do.
Jef Allen
Michael R. Allen
William Anderson
Bill Barnwell -- Potatoe founder. wants to be one of the column cons, i'd guess.
Walter Block
Burton S. Blumert -- jew publisher of lewrockwell.com. metals dealer.
Alan Bock
Gregory Bresiger
Peter Brimelow
Harry Browne
Pat Buchanan
Gene Callahan
Jimmy Cantrell -- very, very interesting writer, funny too, whose thesis, that Celtic is the basis of the True South and All that is Right in the World may well be true. very bigoted, which is always a good sign. bigoted, safely enuf, against germano/wasp culture rather than the semites that pose the greater danger. but will name jews to an extent, which is more than virtually every other LRC-level writer can claim. they're too self-importantly pro freedom and celebrating themselves in their doofy little heads. that means you, murphy.
Stephen Carson
Steve Chapman
Ed Cobb
Alexander Cockburn -- interesting. nasty, which, like bigotry, is always a good sign. free enough will say thing unexpected, brazen enough to crit the murderous yids. dreary commie gruel moralism when you get down to it.
Ann Coulter -- girl jock wannabe, lanky horsey good-looking to feebrepublic types whose eyes for femmes are as bad as their eyes for politics
H.W. Crocker, III
Karen De Coster -- suburban sub-suckpoop, frosted-tip wifey writing-as-jogging gal who wrote one of the most horrifying pieces have ever read, imagining herself ravished by some jew jerry stiller or some other equally repugnant jew comic. my skin crawls even to recall.
Michael Gilson de Lemos David Dieteman -- keeping up the proud tradition of german blockheadedness. real smart and thoughtful guy, simultaneously thick as a brick. good guy to write up the legal boilerplate after the White revolution. not a guy who's going to see, seize chances, and therefore characteristic of most of his sub-race.
Thomas DiLorenzo -- wrote the truth about lincoln's racism, but won't defend that truth and won't name the jew arrayed against him because of it, nor explain the racial animus behind the attacks on his book
Brian Dunaway
Richard Ebeling
Brad Edmonds -- decent guy, writes some good stuff. doesn't get it on the jewish issue, doesn't care
Jeff Elkins
Don Feder
Joseph Farah -- arab christian and the Suckpoop to end all suckpoops. no exaggeration when i say that if israel were to kill every single palestinian overnight, he would have his apology column ready by 6:30 a.m.
Humberto Fontova -- cuban, very good writer, enjoyable stuff. standard anti-communist, but seems like a real man, or at least carries off the persona, compared to the rest of the toadly doofs that populate LRC. funny.
Rick Gee
James Glaser
David Gordon
Paul Gottfried -- jew paleocon. one of the top writers out there, but with a complete inability to write the word 'jew.' blames everything on decayed protestantism and the managerial state. if he weren't jewish he might have written a book very much like culture of critique.
David H. Hackworth
Franklin Harris
Nat Hentoff
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Jacob Hornberger
David Horowitz
Reed Irvine
Gail Jarvis
Myles Kantor
John Keller
Michael Kelly
Stephan Kinsella
Robert Klassen
Michelle Malkin -- pinay who writes the same thing the rest of 'em do, but she's fishhead-soup flavored. the Reps are like some shitty boxed food product that comes in ten different flavors, all of which taste crappy. the difference between one Republican columinst and another is precisely the difference between flavors of Ramen noodles.
Eric Margolis
Ronald M. Maxwell
Daniel McCarthy
Scott McConnell
Ryan McMaken
Ilana Mercer -- jew
Joel Miller
Minority Mike
Rob Moody
John R. Morgan
Stu Morgenstern -- jew
Bob Murphy -- this guy is a self-important doof, and in that way highly qualified to be a libertarian. a witwould in sky-pie.
Patricia Neill -- proud to be irish. how do the irish feel?
Gary North
Robert Novak -- jew turned catholic, ie, a jew -- a midwesterner who concentrates on reporting over fine writing. a genuine oddity in that he's a jew not afraid of private, flyover america, probably because of midwestern origins. critic of israel too, but certainly not a public scoffer at the Underlying Lie of egalitariansm.
James Ostrowski
Camille Paglia
Ron Paul -- a good congressman. the one.
Michael Peirce -- some decent stuff from this zimby merc, but his mind's befogged with the christ superstition, and he still maintains zimby had nothing to do with race. somewhat more realistic than the average libertarian
Richard Poe -- oleaginous horowitz yid now doing his own thing. changed name from pogrebsky, what more do you need to know?
Ralph Raico
Justin Raimondo -- quarter-poofter. that is, all poofter, quarter jewish. great anti-war writer, singlehandedly apart from us nationalists kept the spotlight on izzy spies caught in the U.S. will get spittingly peevish if his hero buchanan is associated with racists. easy trigger. gets real girlish when arguing with racists, which he can't because he can't handle certain facts and has to suppress them like the folks he castigates.
Ted Rall
Charley Reese -- good writer and increasingly critical of israel white southerner, may have been pushed out in orlando due to kike-crit. good guy. wish guys like him would wake up and realize it's race, not region.
Frank Rich -- male twat, of course a jew. pudgy, stupid, theater/politics critic just another jew better underground
Lew Rockwell -- has all the pedestrian virtues and none of the heroic. his formerly beautifully designed site appeared regularly anew around midnight, always 12 articles, including a few originals, always reliably. equally reliable is his syncopation, his complete removal of jew-blame wherever it was logically indicated. quit posting carol ward stuff which he loves because its too hot for the kikes he's afraid of. a perfect one-man example of why shrew-balled libertarians never win. they'll do anything to advance the cause of freedom except point out who's thwarting it.
P. Andrew Sandlin
Jeremy Sapienza -- part jew real estate guy down in sfla, writes for lewcrock, has his own decent site, anti-state.com. one of one libertarians that i know of, apart from 1/4 jew raimondo, who specifically wrote about the hypocrisy of jewish libertarian warmongering. lewpus refused to post it because he was born with silly putty eggs instead of testicles.
Bill Sardi
Butler Shaffer
Robert Scheer
Joseph Sobran
Norman Solomon
Thomas Sowell
Russ Stein
Mark Steyn
Joseph Stromberg
Jacob Sullum
Vin Suprynowicz
George Szamuely
Taki -- extremely rich greek who praises the german officers who holed up in his house when he was a boy in wwii. highly, highly unusual in that regard. funnier and freer than most mainstreamers, but no particular animus against jews, just not afraid of losing income from criticizing them openly, as a scott mcconnell, say, is
Jeffrey Tucker
Judith Vinson
Bob Wallace
Jude Wanniski
Roland Watson
Tom White
Scott Wilkerson
Walter Williams -- black who writes some decent stuff, but semitically correct. will give you some truth on black/white crime, but never point to the jewish problem, may not truly be aware of it.
Thomas Woods
Steven Yates -- perfect example of intellectual christian being as bad as the average dolt-pinhead moralizing evangelical. believes in the devil, operating through the NWO. won't hear a word about jews. classic example of yates was in article about NC prof who died after being hounded by a jewish reporter named something like feinsilver who was trying to make a name for himself outing racism, although it was nonexistent in the guy's case. yates helpfully put (jewish) after the guy's name.
AUSTRALIA

BRITAIN
v Spectator: edited by a Jew, Dominic Lawson. Lawson's father is none other than Nigel Lawson. Nigel Lawson's reckless incompetence when Britain's finance minister resulted in one of the country's worst industrial recessions in history,causing untold suffering and misery.

FRANCE
GERMANY
SOUTH AFRICA
ZIMBABWE

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