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TODAY'S FEATURE

Global Media Cartel Creates "Imaginary Content"

''Based on (U.S. Attorney General John) Ashcroft's Patriot Act, Watergate would have been legal,'' Crockett said. ''In a time of crisis, we should turn to the Constitution, not against it. That's what made us great - isn't doing away with the Constitution the goal of terrorists?'' Crockett and Lawrence channel their frustration into Democratic Talk Radio, an hour-long weekly broadcast they produce and fund. They fax letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines across the country, and this week their first weekly column debuts in the Sparta, Tenn., Expositor. ''This certainly gives the public an alternative to the G. Gordon Liddys,'' said William Farmer, chairman of the Tennessee Democratic Party, from his Lebanon law office last week. ''Steve and Al are great guys. They're making a dent in some of this misinformation, but their impact is limited because of their resources. I wish someone would pick them up and syndicate them.'' WEKR's AM 1240 signal reaches only to the borders of Lincoln County with the live program at 5 p.m. Saturdays. But Democratic Talk Radio reaches beyond the county borders with its web site, www.democratictalkradio.com, complete with a message board, links to other Democratic sites, and archives of the radio programs. ''It's one of the largest Democratic web rings on the net,'' Lawrence said. --Huntsville Times

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What's Wrong With This Picture?

by MARK CRISPIN MILLER

For all their economic clout and cultural sway, the ten great multinationals profiled in our latest chart--AOL Time Warner, Disney, General Electric, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, Sony, Bertelsmann, AT&T and Liberty Media--rule the cosmos only at the moment. The media cartel that keeps us fully entertained and permanently half-informed is always growing here and shriveling there, with certain of its members bulking up while others slowly fall apart or get digested whole. But while the players tend to come and go--always with a few exceptions--the overall Leviathan itself keeps getting bigger, louder, brighter, forever taking up more time and space, in every street, in countless homes, in every other head.

The rise of the cartel has been a long time coming (and it still has some way to go). It represents the grand convergence of the previously disparate US culture industries--many of them vertically monopolized already--into one global superindustry providing most of our imaginary "content." The movie business had been largely dominated by the major studios in Hollywood; TV, like radio before it, by the triune axis of the networks headquartered in New York; magazines, primarily by Henry Luce (with many independent others on the scene); and music, from the 1960s, mostly by the major record labels. Now all those separate fields are one, the whole terrain divided up among the giants--which, in league with Barnes & Noble, Borders and the big distributors, also control the book business. (Even with its leading houses, book publishing was once a cottage industry at both the editorial and retail levels.) For all the democratic promise of the Internet, moreover, much of cyberspace has now been occupied, its erstwhile wildernesses swiftly paved and lighted over by the same colossi. The only industry not yet absorbed into this new world order is the newsprint sector of the Fourth Estate--a business that was heavily shadowed to begin with by the likes of Hearst and other, regional grandees, flush with the ill-gotten gains of oil, mining and utilities--and such absorption is, as we shall see, about to happen.

Thus what we have today is not a problem wholly new in kind but rather the disastrous upshot of an evolutionary process whereby that old problem has become considerably larger--and that great quantitative change, with just a few huge players now co-directing all the nation's media, has brought about enormous qualitative changes. 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."

Of all the cartel's dangerous consequences for American society and culture, the worst is its corrosive influence on journalism. Under AOL Time Warner, GE, Viacom et al., the news is, with a few exceptions, yet another version of the entertainment that the cartel also vends nonstop. This is also nothing new--consider the newsreels of yesteryear--but the gigantic scale and thoroughness of the corporate concentration has made a world of difference, and so has made this world a very different place. (continued)

The true motives of this administration were made clear by Antonin Scalia last December, when he declared first that "There is no right of suffrage (for president) under Article II," and then led the conservative majority to act on that statement, annulling the election. By George Bush's own words, Scalia speaks Bush's truest thoughts; and the Federalist Society, for whom Scalia is the guiding light, and whose membership is the litmus test for Bush's judicial appointments, is explicitly committed to repealing all civil rights legislation of the 20th Century. Thoughts expressed to me personally by a prominent developer here in Orange County, California, birthplace of the new right, jibe with public statements by the Federalist Society to lend credence to the fear that these people have every intention of repealing suffrage from all except wealthy landowners. (They seem to feel the first draft of the Declaration of Independence - 'Life, Liberty and Property' - is the only rightful foundation for the country.)

So it is not just that every effort was made by the Republicans to rig the Florida vote, even to the extent of colluding with the military to pack the overseas ballots with votes cast after November 7th, (as reported by the NY Times); culminating with a shutdown of the lawful vote count; there is every indication that the justification Republicans used will serve again to erase the democratic experiment as we've known it.

I am not the only one to believe that with a government characterized by lawless power, we have lost any moral protection from lawless power. The perpetrators of the attacks of Sept 11th weren't any more clever than those of past attempts that were either thwarted or limited in their effect. But the Bush administration's theft of the election wasn't just a singular disrespect for law and democracy, it was the founding principle of all to come. In office, while brusquely dismissing any and all concerns of other countries, our entire foreign policy came down to 'missile defense,' now acknowledged to be a salesman's rubric for a globe- encircling network of space lasers able to fire down onto the planet to ensure our global corporate hegemony.

At present we hang by some very slender threads, namely the continued influence of Colin Powell and the continued life of George H.W. Bush. Both foreign policy crisis's of this administration have followed identical paths: with both the China spyplane incident and the attacks of Sept. 11th, George W. Bush and his coterie of right-wing academics came out swinging rhetorically, only to be brushed back by George H.W. Bush. After Junior's speechwriters got their new orders, Poppy and friends got to work. In China, Poppy, brother Prescott (Chairman of the China-USA Chamber of Commerce), Brent Scowcroft and Henry Kissinger, the entire China access lobby, did their back-channel negotiations while apparently Colin Powell worked the front channels. In our current crisis, Colin Powell has taken the public body blows from the raging hot-house flowers of the conservative establishment (Newt, Rush, Condi, Trent, Grover, etc.) clamoring for immediate gratification; while sources have reported that Poppy is again working his rolodex to get all the ducks in a row.

All in all, we cannot escape either the illegitimacy or the inadequacy of this Bush administration. Once the present crisis eases to some extent, the establishment media, which has until now been either complacent or complicit, must however gently bring these facts to the fore and prepare for this administration's removal from office. --Kent Southard

Let Me Conjugate Your Booty... "Gearheads" and "hotties" now have an official place in the English language, and the wordsmiths at Merriam-Webster don't mind if they shake their booties or give each other noogies. Those slang terms have been added to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary Tenth Edition. "Snagglebutt," "nukuler," "waxy sexless quivering masses of pale deadly malefic vice presidents who snort motor oil and drink rat's blood" were also included, but only for one crazy night during the dictionary staff's Christmas laughing gas/sleeping pill party. "Noogie booty gearhead hottie!" yelled a completely stoned editor.... --Mark Morford

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