Betrakt dette som en appetittvekker for Edward Herman og Noam Chomskys
fabelaktige bok.
I all beskjedenhet henviser jeg også til en egen sak,
http://www.itk.ntnu.no/ansatte/Andresen_Trond/articles/media-dynamics.html
hilsen
Trond Andresen
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(The following is a sub-chapter from the book "Manufacturing Consent -
The Political Economy of the Mass media" by Edward Herman and Noam
Chomsky, Pantheon Books 1988.
It is distributed electronically with permission from the authors.
The sub-chapter concerns one of several"filters" that the authors say
bias the mass media in favour of the power and business elite.
Technical note: I have copied it from the book with an optical
character reader (OCR), so there may be some typos. And reference
numbers came out as ordinary numbers, not in superscript. References
are for reasons of additonal and unwelcome work not included. I
strongly recommend reading the book!).
- T.A.
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1.2. THE ADVERTISING LICENSE TO DO BUSINESS:
THE SECOND FILTER
In arguing for the benefits of the free market as a means of
controlling dissident opinion in the mid-nineteenth century, the
Liberal chancellor of the British exchequer, Sir George Lewis,
noted that the market would promote those papers "enjoying the
preference of the advertising public.''41 Advertising did, in fact,
serve as a powerful mechanism weakening the working-class
press. Curran and Seaton give the growth of advertising a status
comparable with the increase in capital costs as a factor allowing
the market to accomplish what state taxes and harassment failed to
do, noting that these "advertisers thus acquired a de facto licensing
authority since, without their support, newspapers ceased to be
economically viable."42 Before advertising became prominent,
the price of a newspaper had to cover the costs of doing business.
With the growth of advertising, papers that attracted ads could
afford a copy price well below produc tion costs. This put papers
lacking in advertising at a serious disadvan tage: their prices
would tend to be higher, curtailing sales, and they would have less
surplus to invest in improving the salability of the paper (features,
attractive format, promotion, etc.). For this reason, an advertising-
based system will tend to drive out of existence or into marginality
the media companies and types that depend on revenue from sales
alone. With advertising, the free market does not yield a neutral
system in which final buyer choice decides. The advertisers'
choices influence media prosperity and survival.43 The ad-based
media receive an advertising subsidy that gives them a price-
marketing-quality edge, which allows them to encroach on and
further weaken their ad-free (or ad disadvantaged) rivals.44 Even
if ad-based media cater to an affluent ("upscale") audience, they
easily pick up a large part of the "downscale" audience, and their
rivals lose market share and are eventually driven out or
marginalized. In fact, advertising has played a potent role in
increasing concentration even among rivals that focus with equal
energy on seeking advertising revenue. A market share and
advertising edge on the part of one paper or television station will
give it additional revenue to compete more effectively-promote
more aggressively, buy more salable fea tures and programs-and
the disadvantaged rival must add expenses it cannot afford to try
to stem the cumulative process of dwindling market (and revenue)
share. The crunch is often fatal, and it helps explain the death of
many large-circulation papers and magazines and the attrition in
the number of newspapers.45 From the time of the introduction
of press advertising, therefore, working-class and radical papers
have been at a serious disadvantage. Their readers have tended to
be of modest means, a factor that has always affected advertiser
interest. One advertising executive stated in 1856 that some
journals are poor vehicles because "their readers are not
purchasers, and any money thrown upon them is so much thrown
away."46 The same force took a heavy toll of the post-World War
II social-democratic press in Great Britain, with the Daily Herald,
News Chronicle, and Sunday Citizen failing or absorbed into
establishment systems between I960 and I967, despite a collective
average daily read ership of 9.3 million. As James Curran points
out, with 4.7 million readers in its last year, "the Daily Herald
actually had almost double the readership of The Times, the
Financial Times and the Guardian combined." What is more,
surveys showed that its readers "thought more highly of their
paper than the regular readers of any other popular newspaper,"
and "they also read more in their paper than the readers of other
popular papers despite being overwhelmingly working class...."47
The death of the Herald, as well as of the News Chronicle and
Sunday Citizen, was in large measure a result of progressive
strangulation by lack of advertising support. The Herald, with 8.1
percent of national daily circulation, got 3.5 percent of net
advertising revenue; the Sunday Citizen got one-tenth of the net
advertising revenue of the Sunday Times and one-seventh that of
the Observer (on a per-thousand-copies basis). Curran argues
persuasively that the loss of these three papers was an important
contribution to the declining fortunes of the Labor party, in the
case of the Herald specifically removing a mass-circulation
institution that provided "an alternative framework of analysis and
understanding that contested the dominant systems of
representation in both broadcasting and the mainstream press."48
A mass movement without any major media support, and subject
to a great deal of active press hostility, suffers a serious disability,
and struggles against grave odds. The successful media today are
fully attuned to the crucial importance of audience "quality": CBS
proudly tells its shareholders that while it "continuously seeks to
maximize audience delivery," it has developed a new "sales tool"
with which it approaches advertisers: "Client Audience Profile, or
CAP, will help advertisers optimize the effectiveness of their
network television schedules by evaluating audi ence segments in
proportion to usage levels of advertisers' products and
services."49 In short, the mass media are interested in attracting
audiences with buying power, not audiences per se; it is affluent
audiences that spark advertiser interest today, as in the nineteenth
century. The idea that the drive for large audiences makes the mass
media "democratic" thus suffers from the initial weakness that its
political analogue is a voting system weighted by income! The
power of advertisers over television programming stems from the
simple fact that they buy and pay for the programs-they are the
"patrons" who provide the media subsidy. As such, the media
compete for their patronage, developing specialized staff to solicit
advertisers and necessarily having to explain how their programs
serve advertisers' needs. The choices of these patrons greatly
affect the welfare of the media, and the patrons become what
William Evan calls "normative reference organizations,"50 whose
requirements and demands the media must accommodate if they
are to succeed.51 For a television network, an audience gain or
loss of one percentage point in the Nielsen ratings translates into a
change in advertising revenue of from $80 to $100 million a year,
with some variation depend ing on measures of audience
"quality." The stakes in audience size and affluence are thus
extremely large, and in a market system there is a strong tendency
for such considerations to affect policy profoundly. This is partly
a matter of institutional pressures to focus on the bottom line,
partly a matter of the continuous interaction of the media or
ganization with patrons who supply the revenue dollars. As Grant
Tinker, then head of NBC-TV, observed, television "is an
advertising supported medium, and to the extent that support falls
out, program ming will change."52 Working-class and radical
media also suffer from the political discrimination of advertisers.
Political discrimination is structured into advertising allocations
by the stress on people with money to buy. But many firms will
always refuse to patronize ideological enemies and those whom
they perceive as damaging their interests, and cases of overt
discrimination add to the force of the voting system weighted by
income. Public-television station WNET lost its corporate funding
from Gulf + Western in I985 after the station showed the
documentary "Hungry for Profit," which contains material critical
of multinational corporate activities in the Third World. Even
before the program was shown, in anticipation of negative
corporate reaction, station officials "did all we could to get the
program sanitized" (according to one station source).53 The chief
executive of Gulf + Western complained to the station that the
program was "virulently anti-business if not anti American," and
that the station's carrying the program was not the behavior "of a
friend" of the corporation. The London Economist says that "Most
people believe that WNET would not make the same mis take
again."54 In addition to discrimination against unfriendly media
institutions, advertisers also choose selectively among programs
on the basis of their own principles. With rare exceptions these are
culturally and politically conservative.55 Large corporate
advertisers on television will rarely sponsor programs that engage
in serious criticisms of corporate activities, such as the problem of
environmental degradation, the workings of the military-industrial
complex, or corporate support of and benefits from Third World
tyrannies. Erik Barnouw recounts the history of a proposed
documentary series on environmental problems by NBC at a time
of great interest in these issues. Barnouw notes that although at
that time a great many large companies were spending money on
commercials and other publicity regarding environmental
problems, the documentary series failed for want of sponsors. The
problem was one of excessive objectivity in the series, which
included suggestions of corporate or systemic failure, whereas the
corporate message "was one of reassurance."56 Television
networks learn over time that such programs will not sell and
would have to be carried at a financial sacrifice, and that, in
addition, they may offend powerful advertisers.57 With the rise in
the price of advertising spots, the forgone revenue increases; and
with increasing market pressure for financial performance and the
diminishing constraints from regulation, an advertising-based
media system will gradually increase advertising time and
marginalize or eliminate altogether programming that has
significant public-affairs content.53 Advertisers will want, more
generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and
disturbing controversies that interfere with the "buy ing mood."
They seek programs that will lightly entertain and thus fit in with
the spirit of the primary purpose of program purchases-the
dissemination of a selling message. Thus over time, instead of
programs like "The Selling of the Pentagon," it is a natural
evolution of a market seeking sponsor dollars to offer programs
such as "A Bird's-Eye View of Scotland," "Barry Goldwater's
Arizona," "An Essay on Hotels," and "Mr. Rooney Goes to
Dinner"-a CBS program on "how Americans eat when they dine
out, where they go and why."59 There are exceptional cases of
companies willing to sponsor serious programs, some times a
result of recent embarrassments that call for a public-relations
offset.60 But even in these cases the companies will usually not
want to sponsor close examination of sensitive and divisive
issues-they prefer programs on Greek antiquities, the ballet, and
items of cultural and national history and nostalgia. Barnouw
points out an interesting contrast: commercial-television drama
"deals almost wholly with the here and now, as processed via
advertising budgets," but on public televi sion, culture "has come
to mean 'other cultures.' . . . American civiliza tion, here and now,
is excluded from consideration.''6l Television stations and
networks are also concerned to maintain audience "flow" levels,
i.e., to keep people watching from program to program, in order to
sustain advertising ratings and revenue. Airing program interludes
of documentary-cultural matter that cause station switching is
costly, and over time a "free" (i.e., ad-based) commercial system
will tend to excise it. Such documentary-cultural-critical materials
will be driven out of secondary media vehicles as well, as these
companies strive to qualify for advertiser interest, although there
will always be some cultural-political programming trying to
come into being or surviving on the periphery of the mainstream
media.