The Media: Its Master's Voice

MEDIA HosTER's In times of need the media will serve its underlines the importance of the socialist masters. Owners and producers are part demand to take the media under public of the political establishment and often ownership and democratic control. It also leading members of the ruling class. In emphasises the need for the left and in Britain we have seen the malign influence particular for Respect to launch a broad- of global media moguls such as Rupert based alternative socialist press, along FOX NEWS consensus kicked into action in the way it did immediately after the bombings, often contradicting previous editorial policies. Was it a response to government instructions to editors, what used to be called D-Notices? Government attacks on the BBC post- Hutton have clearly taken their toll on that organisation. Newsnight has, over the past months, shifted to the right particularly when presented by Jeremy Paxman or Gavin Esler. Paxman is reported to have said he had never been subject to censorship or been told what to say. If true, it is surely because he, like his colleague Gavin Esler, is considered a safe pair of hands. Recently, they both attempted a grotesque public humiliation of George Galloway. Why? Because Galloway is the only truly outspoken, prominent critic of the war, both inside and outside parliament. And, what is more dangerous for the establishment, he speaks for millions of people on the streets on this crucial issue. In contrast to Paxman, John Pilger has consistently refused to comply with any bourgeois consensus, which ensures that he will never be employed as a presenter of Newsnight. He only gets late night slots for his critical investigative journalism. However, the government would like the British media to be even more like Fox News in the USA, which is not so much a news service as the propaganda machine of the Republican right. Programmes like Newsnight or Panorama usually serve their masters in a moderate fashion, allowing some critical reports for reasons of 'balance', at least compared with the right wing tabloid newspaper's hysteria over Muslim bombers and the traitor Galloway. Taken as a whole, the mainstream media response to the London bombing, both right wing and liberal, has shown once again the limited extent of its independence. As in France, where the media campaigned for a 'Yes' to the European Constitution in the face of the popular 'No', the media here has been widely discredited because of its craven capitulation to the requirements of Murdoch and Conrad Black, former owner with other new media projects. of the Daily lelegraph. • VOICE B BICI Research from Sonoma State University in the US reveals that there were only 118 people on the boards of directors of the ten big media organizations in the US. 'These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. In fact, eight out of ten big media giants share common memberships on boards of directors with each other! Professor Phillips, who oversaw the research, describes the US media as 'like one big happy family of interlocks and shared interests! He concludes: 'we can no longer call it mainstream or refer to it as plural. Instead we need to say that corporate media is corporate America, and that we the mainstream people need to be looking at alternative independent sources for our news and information' The media in Britain is similarly dominated by a few powerful millionaires, or like the BBC subject to influence and threats from government and the state. This 5