Politics And The Media

18 Pages 4595 Words

porations own the media. Elite theorists have articulated that giant business enterprises and politicians hold a symbiotic relationship. They are and must remain interdependent on one another in order to sustain their dominant status. The media is a corporation owned by conglomerates, therefore one cannot mistake the media’s membership in the coefficient group. In America where the “levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite” (Chomsky 1). In spite of the media’s patronage with the government and corporations, one would wonder who controls whom. Not only do the politicians and huge conglomerate enterprises need ends to be met through positive political discourse and brainwashing advertisements incorporated in the media, but the media also needs ends to be served. Insofar the media is a business enterprise trying to substantiate their profits; thus the media can too dictate politicians and corporations. Any discordance amidst these three agencies will produce ramifications that would endanger the paradigm pertaining to their established elite positions. Consequently, collusion will be assessed if such a problem emerged in the symbiotic equation of power. “No politician likes to lose the sympathy of even a single newspaper or radio station. For a national leader to lose the support of a major portion of all American media can be a political disaster” (Bagdikian 91). This became evidently clear when Richard Berlin, the president and chief executive officer of the Hearst Corporation in New York, asked President Richard Nixon to grant him immunity from the antimonopoly law that had in previous years sent other corporate executives to jail. The Hearst Corporation “owned nine newspapers, ten broadcasting stations, twenty-six magazines, and a book publishing house” (Bag...