Corporate Media

You don't love me. You want me to love you.

Susan Kane

Introduction to Corporate Media​

Corporate Media, also known as mainstream or mass media, is the content that we watched on television growing up. Our interest here is information content in the form of news and opinion. It was distributed by large corporations, because it required enormous amounts of money to acquire the licenses and equipment to broadcast over the air.

These few corporations distributed almost everything that the American Public saw and heard every single day. We expected them to be fair and impartial when reporting the news. The public was supposedly protected by holding journalists accountable to professional journalistic standards. That scouts-honor system is a lie designed to gaslight you.

The gaslight design works by convincing you that their information is legitimate without questioning it. The experts were supposed to do that job for us. Professional journalists in general have integrity and more or less stick to the standard. It is not my intention to besmirch the character of journalists or their profession. The problem isn't journalists. The problem is that their work is at the whim of for-profit corporations that decide what gets published and what does not.

How corporations distort the news​

The primary job of corporations in our culture is to make money for shareholders. It overrides all other non-existential concerns for the company. This profit motive is healthy when profit is obtained as a result of delivering better products than competitors, otherwise it is perverse. In this case the product is news and information useful to the American public.

Let us explore some specific ways that corporations distort news.

Corporate Media favors corporate interests over personal interests​

This is because they are corporations. An example here is the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. You probably didn't heard much about about it from Corporate Media, or at least while it was still a bill. This is the law that reduced corporate federal tax rates from 35% to 21%. You certainly won't see anything from corporate media describing it as unjust, because this makes more money for corporations and them.

News coverage at the time talked about the bill swiftly moving through Congress that reduces federal deficits and the distribution of cuts across income groups. It focused on everything except what the bill was actually doing.

This results in unjust laws with no way for the public to challenge them and no consequences for legislators that voted for it. The law is enacted in tyranny.

Failure to properly measure public opinion does not absolve corporation or politicians of this crime against the people.

Corporate Media favors their individual company interests and suppress market competition​

A simple example here is in coverage of social media. Social media sites hosting Independent Media are providing coverage and convenience that Corporate Media simply cannot compete with in their current state. They are so clueless in fact, that they are busy pushing a rather Orwellian ATSC 3.0 specification through Congress as if it's going to matter in 10 years. Maybe they think that they can reestablish a media oligopoly like they previously enjoyed, but I will see to it that they fail.

Corporate media will tell you all kinds of tales about how social media is damaging kids. They will spew propaganda about how the social media company should be held liable for the actions of the independent creators that they host. They will rarely say anything good about social media. Social media companies and Independent Creators are their major market competition. They would love to make it too risky to be profitable through lawfare for platforms to host independent media.

If this happens, then there will be no way for independent creators to reach millions of viewers online.

Corporate Media companies are media conglomerates​

Corporate media delivers not just news, but entertainment as well. ABC News brought to you by the Disney Corporation. CBS News from Paramount. What do they have in common? Lots of copyrights on lots of things!

You will never see coverage about 95-year corporate copyright term lengths, because it would be a disadvantage for them.
You will never see stories about independent musicians getting SLAPPed out of business because they played a few notes on the guitar from a song written 50 years ago. Fortunately, we have Independent Media and so you can hear about the copyright problem on YouTube.

Corporate Media favors advertisers​

You thought you were Corporate Media's customer? No, you are Corporate Media's product sold to advertisers in neat little categories.

You don't hear much about RoundUp herbicide's glyphosate and cancer risk claims. They bribe the news to suppress it by purchasing advertising. There may be people in the US with cancer right now because our trusted news media failed to inform them of potential risks associated with that product. I'm saying the product causes cancer, just that there are credible concerns of it based on research and it is irresponsible not to inform the public so that they can make a decision for themselves on whether or how to use it.

Corporate Media companies are vulnerable to attacks from other large companies​

Corporate Media cannot do stories about the Visa and Mastercard monopoly without serious risk to their business. Consumer payments are overwhelmingly dominated by these two companies. Their names are spoken in hushed tones and rarely in public. The threat of retaliation from these juggernauts could ruin a large corporation. They cannot talk about the exorbitant transaction fees. They cannot talk about alternative payment solutions that you see all over the place in Asia.

Independent Media creators can talk about this while Corporate Media cannot. They could certainly threaten me if I accepted their payment methods or make it impossible to use them in the future. I suspect that they would relent when the office of my Senator gives them a call.

The primary purpose of Corporate Media is entertainment, not information.​

Time to look at my two favorite punching bags: CNN and Fox News. Neither of these networks produce news. Even their news isn't news because it's blatant partisan propaganda. It's what you watch when you want to see talking heads dunking on Republicans or Democrats. If you want information, you go elsewhere.

CNN loves the Trump polling numbers. In the last year they have done probably 100 hours of just talking about presidential approval polls. Keep in mind that the next election is still about 7 months away. This isn't informing the public. It's being a DNC cheerleader. Certainly it is not the days of Wolf Blitzer hunkered down at a Baghdad hotel in the first Gulf War.

Fox News is valiantly defending Mr. Trump's literal Criminal Racketeering Enterprise. You know the one. It's the involving himself, Pam Bondi, and Kash Patel. He gives orders and they follow in spite of their duties to the Constitution. The Enterprise is not the offices and cabinet positions. The enterprise is his personal organization and the people involved with it.

They do this because it gets the rubes riled up to doom watch more propaganda. It's entertainment designed to look like news even if it doesn't "feel" like entertainment. Horror movies don't either, it's fine. There is a flaw in their plan: People are exhausted. They've been mislead for so long that they simply aren't buying the same propaganda.

CNN and Fox News should be talking about the actual issues instead of party views on them. If they want to talk opinion, try a discussion that's interesting like what the approach to prosecuting Mr. Trump's enterprise under the RICO Act could look like.

Astute individuals will recognize that I am conflating news content and opinion content. I do this because your networks do this and I'm proving a point:

The proof are all the people who didn't notice before. Don't worry, you get revenge on the smart people in another story.

Conclusion​

The platforms are defective in that they do not properly distinguish between these things in a way that the general public perceives. The public is harmed because they believe that Corporate News is describing factual news content when they are often describing non-factual opinion disguised to look like news. I will go deeper into media deception at another time.

Corporations simply have too many conflicts of interest to be an unregulated market controlling everything we see and hear. Corporate profit motives simply dwarf any concerns for integrity or delivering quality news and information to the public.