Political Messages: There is No Alternative

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1.6 Political Messages: There is No Alternative

“ The role of the media in contemporary politics forces us to ask: What kind of a world and what kind of a society we want to live in, and in particular in what sense of democracy do we want this to be a democratic society”. –Noam Chomsky 2002, p. 9 Democracy is in the worst interest of national goals and the modern world is far too complex to allow the man or woman on the street, to interfere in any way with its management. - Time Magazine 1996 In addition to disseminating consumer ideologies, contemporary media- cultural oligopolies, monopolies, and conglomerates also disseminate the ideology that free-market capitalism and republican forms of democracy are the only viable political-economic arrangements. Thus, media-cultural corporations help to perpetuate the hegemony of neoliberalism by circumventing criticism of it on at least two levels. At the first level they saturate audiences with discourses and practices that affirm and legitimize capitalism and hierarchical forms of institutional organization. Such discourses stress self-interestedness, competition, greed, an appeal to and valorisation of corporate hierarchy and authority, and an overall uncritical culture of hyper-consumerism. In contemporary neoliberal societies, this hyper-consumer culture stretches to the extent that even political and civic participation is conflated with consumerist practices like voting heavily marketed candidates into power, or other acts of what can be termed as politics from a distance, e.g. digital petitions, donations to NGOs, or ethical consumption. As Chomsky 2002, p. 22 argues: The people in the public relations industry arent there for the fun of it. Theyre doing work. Theyre trying to instill the right values. In fact, they have a conception of what democracy ought to be: It ought to be a system in which the specialized class is trained to work in the service of the masters, the people who own the society. The rest of the population ought to be deprived of any form of organization, because organization just causes trouble. They ought to be sitting alone in front of the TV and having drilled into their heads the message, which says, the only value in life is to have more commodities or live like that rich 49 middle class family youre watching and to have nice values like harmony and Americanism. Thats all there is in life. 21 At the second level, if the first level of inculcation is not achieved, and individuals become critical of the established order, then, in constantly promoting the idea that there is no alternative to the established societal order, and in reducing political discourse to images, sound-bites, catchphrases, vacuous slogans, and personalities, media-culture corporations help to stymie the political-economic imagination of the public. This is not to suggest that corporate media outlets are uncritical, but rather that the field of criticism is narrowed and constrained by the opposing views of elite interests and dominant groups Herman Chomsky, 2002. Western mainstream media debates over major issues like war and education, financial, or welfare reform, for example, are framed and inflected by state-corporate interests that often obscure non-elite criticisms, alternatives, and minority voices Chomsky, 2002; Coleman, 2012; deMause Rendall, 2007; Goodman Goodman, 2007; Jackson, 2011. 22 Alternatives to hierarchical institutional organizational forms such as workplace democracy are rarely showcased by mainstream media with the occasional exception featuring a usually condescending story about an upstart worker’s co-op. However, it is not the case that political-economic alternatives are non- existent, or that Francis Fukuyama 1992 is correct in famously declaring the end of history. Millions of individual activists and organizations both in Western and non-Western countries continue to actively struggle against neoliberal hegemony, in some cases in the face of outright violent state-corporate repression. For example, Klein 2000, Graeber 2009:2004, and Patel 2010 point to several anarchist and anti-neoliberal groups from all over the world which are not only fiercely anti-neoliberal, but which are also made up of dedicated practitioners of alternative political-economic practices based on values of altruism, generosity, 21 Chomsky 2002 draws this conclusion from reviewing state policy papers, business literature, and influential papers by leading theorists of 20 th century US democracy including Walter Lippman, Edward Bernays, and George Kennan all of whom showed contempt for the general public, and saw propaganda as an essential tool needed to check the democratic impulses of the masses. 22 In the US, for instance, studies by the media watch-group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting FAIR, have repeatedly shown that mass-media news outlets like major newspapers and television news shows tend to predominantly invite elite pundits, academics, and politicians to debate and discuss major policy issues. These people tend to express opinions that favor elite interests which often go against public opinion see http:www.fair.orgindex.php?page=12 . 50 cooperation, and directparticipatory and non-hierarchical forms of democracy and economics. Other alternative and recent political developments include the election of, and popular support for, several South American left-leaning Presidents who are staunchly opposed to the Washington Consensus. Alternative institutional organizational projects continue to spring up all over the Western and Non-Western world from the factory takeovers in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to the participatory budgeting practices of the residents of Porto Alegre Brazil, to the workplace democratic practices of IT firms in California e.g., SemCo Enterprises. However, even if one does not agree with these or other non-elite criticisms and alternatives, their erosion from or demonization by mainstream mass media Herman Chomsky, 2002 has, as stated earlier, a potentially debilitating effect on the pu blic’s political and economic imagination, and on their abilities to conceive of a genuine alternative to the dominant neoliberal model. As Habermas 1991 and McChesney Nichols 2009 argue, our democratic public spheres continue, and at a historically unprecedented pace, to be co-opted, cheapened, and stripped of substance by media conglomerates, all while the lively, diverse, open, and free presses that informed generations of radical democratic activism throughout the 18 th , 19 th , and early 20 th centuries continue to disappear, be bought out, or worse still, turned into manufacturers of ridiculous infotainment that celebrates the opulence of the rich and famous. One can hardly go a day using the tube or buses in London, for example, without spotting leftover Sun or Metro newspapers featuring the latest celebrity gossip. And in Los Angeles, for example, and as likely in other parts of the US, there are at least four evening television shows specifically dedicated to celebrity gossip in daily circulation across the channels of the major television networks e.g., Fox’s TMZ, NBC’s Access Hollywood, NBC’s Extra, and CBS’s Entertainment Tonight . The few independent non-corporate media that report non-elite interests and voices are marginalized, constantly under-funded, and often have to compete with the highly psychologically developed and far reaching spin of state departments and their ever expanding corporate media conveyer belts Goodman Goodman, 2007. It cannot be stressed enough that the range of ideological messages that publics are exposed to via mass media is becoming narrower and narrower McGuigan, 2010:2010a. As Kellner 1998a, p . 11 in the US context argues, “giant media 51 conglomerates are producing a new world culture that is in fact a rather shallow reflection of the American Way of Life”. How contemporary UK and US young people engage with, reject, or are influenced by this neoliberal consumer media-culture at the micro subjective and socio-cognitive level will be theorized, explored, and discussed in the subsequent chapters of this thesis. For now, it is sufficient to argue that at the macro-level, neoliberalism, in addition to the economic, welfare, and education institutions, urban landscapes, and civil society institutions thus far discussed, has also, and to a significant extent, inflected the major cultural institutions and cultural and political-philosophical discourses which they disseminate, and which UK and US young people are largely surrounded by.

1.7 Summary