By Roberto Savio
SAN SALVADOR, Sep 4 2013 (IPS)

Few people today know that when the first news agencies were created in the 19th century, the French Havas and the British Reuters divided the world between themselves.

The division followed the borders of the two colonial empires, and Latin America, for example, basically went to Havas while Reuters had the United States.

Roberto Savio

United Press International (UPI) was the first American agency to break the monopoly, claiming that America could not be seen through British eyes (very much the same cry from the Third World against the North’s monopoly of information) and, for many years, UPI was considered one of the media world’s giants.

So it came as a shock when a Mexican millionaire, Mario Vázquez Raña, bought UPI in 1986 for 41 million dollars, famously declaring: “I had two Falcon jets. I sold one and I bought UPI.”

Since then, the concentration of the media in the hands of millionaires and billionaires has continued unabated. The cases of Rupert Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi are the most famous.

But concentration of the media in fewer and fewer hands is a global phenomenon. Some media observers see in this a turn to the right, propelled by those with money. It is not a plot; it is simply that 100 people who own a Ferrari tend to have a more similar view of things than, for example, 100 people who own a Volkswagen.

The United States is a good observatory on the world of information. It was in the U.S. that the expression “mass media” was coined in the wake of the attempt to sell a very large number of newspapers in order to be viable. In Europe, on the other hand, newspapers were for a small elite, not for the masses.

The famous Times of London (now owned by Murdoch), for example, sold only an average of 50,000 copies, all for the British Empire’s elite. In fact, European newspapers were “cultured”, with long articles and lots of analysis, and language was very important. Media in the U.S. went in the opposite direction, and the mass media were born.

In the last few weeks, an impressive number of prestigious U.S. newspapers have been bought by billionaires. The most famous case is the Washington Post which, along with the New York Times, was considered a leader among U.S. media.

The Post had been held by the same family, the Grahams, for 80 years. It was bought by Jeffery Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, for 250 million dollars. This represents one percent of his personal wealth (Amazon has a market capitalisation of 135.2 billion dollars). But the Post sold several others local papers in the package, which was evaluated 10 years ago at five billion dollars.

This is one final nail in the coffin of family-owned newspapers. The Chandler family once owned the Los Angeles Times, the Copley family the San Diego Tribune, the Cowles the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and the Bancrofts the Wall Street Journal; these families defended the independence and identity of their newspapers.

But all that is changing, or has already changed. A good example comes from comparing the WSJ during the time of the Bancrofts and now that it is under the ownership of the ubiquitous Murdoch. It is now practically aligned with Fox TV, another Murdoch acquisition. The Boston Globe was purchased by another billionaire, John Henry, for a mere 70 million dollars. The New York Times paid 1.1 billion dollars for the Globe in 1993.

The question is how long the New York Times will last as the last iconic family newspaper, owned by four generations of Sulzbergers since 1896. It is not losing money, but it is a butterfly fish in a world of sharks.

It has a market capitalisation of 1.69 billion dollars against Murdoch’s News Corporation’s 56.66 billion, the Bloomberg family’s 27 billion, Facebook’s 93.86 billion and Google’s 282.04 billion. In other words, big money is now doing the talking and, in that sense, the future of the battle is online.

The Alliance for Audited Media has reported a dramatic reduction in sales of magazines. Newsweek was bought for one dollar in 2010, and magazines from Vogue to Vanity Fair and from People to Metropolitan have all suffered a similar fate. On the other hand, the AAM reports that online subscriptions reached 10.2 million in the first half of 2013, almost double the 5.4 million for the same period in 2012.

The New York Times has aggressively started online subscriptions, and has already reached more than 60,000 subscribers. It is confident that this will make the newspaper viable for a long time, and has announced that it is not for sale. But what is becoming clear is that the distinction between media producers and systems of distribution is disappearing.

Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo are looking for more news to transmit, to increase advertising. By buying YouTube and Zagat, Google has squarely moved into the content arena. Yahoo has now bought a new medium, a micro-blogging system that today allows 119 million users to quickly post words and pictures, for 1.1 billion dollars, more than three times the combined sale prices for the Post and the Globe. So, prestigious names come cheap!

The problem is that the online subscribers represent an anthropological change from the old-style readers. They are restless minds, who love to shift from page to page, and long articles and analysis will progressively shrink. Increasingly, this is going to be the case as the next generations grow up.

A major study on young people between 14 and 16, carried out at the University of Paris Sorbonne, shows that they have an attention span much shorter than that of their parents (as any teacher today can confirm).

And for those young people, the borderline between traditional professional journalism and so-called citizens’ journalism, practised by anyone who wants to post news and photos on the web, is disappearing.

As a result, anything over 850 words (like this very summary article, which is over 1,000 words) is no longer considered fit for printing … does this bode well for a better informed and more aware world?

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

The media did their best to make the U.S. presidential election look important, the altar on which democracy is built. But there has been a problem ever since the Supreme Court legalised unlimited campaign spending (six billion dollars this year), thereby authorising one more freedom of expression, called “commercial speech” even though much of this speech is libellous, often neither true nor relevant.

Johan Galtung

There were real disagreements, some kind of rhetorical left-right. However, the real problem lies somewhere else, not in what was said but in what was not. The list is long. The Washington Post on election day (Manuel Roig-Fanza): “A tough day for causes without a candidate”. The article mentions climate change, gun control and immigration as issues that werent picked up by either one of the party conventions, nor in the debates. But there are many more pressing problems confronting the country.

Two major lobbies advocating the use of force were left untouched: the National Rifle Association, NRA, for violence in the U.S., and the American-Israeli Political Action Committee, AIPAC, for violence abroad, mainly anti-Muslim wars.

They both exercise power through their impact on the media, denying critical politicians access to political power, thereby removing obstacles to violence. Dennis Kucinich, a voice for peace in Congress, and other critics, had the boundaries of their districts changed so that they were not reelected, fatally reducing the political spectrum in Congress and elsewhere. Both presidential candidates knew that to take them on would be suicidal.

Foreign policy was twisted in the debates to economic relations with China, trying to sound tough. But the U.S. majority cannot live without affordable Chinese goods with adequate quality/price ratios. Unless a big unless the U.S. restructures its economy from below, with cooperatives and self-employment, activating the countryside and local communities with numerous small enterprises focused on basic needs, food above all, housing and clothing, health and education, direct from producers to consumers.

No country in the world has a population so creative and cooperative. But the blossoming Occupy Movement has so far limited itself to occupation and critique, not to constructive action. They left untouched the basic change in the world: the U.S. grip on elites in other countries is loosening, in Latin America, even Africa, in the Arab awakening.

Instead they recited the “largest economy in the world” (the European Union is bigger, and China will overtake the U.S. soon) and the “strongest military power in the world” (losing Vietnam, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan is a strange concept of “strongest”).

Climate change: the U.S. is dragging its feet, delaying action in any international fora. Not the candidates, but Nature, in the shape of Sandy, talked, a brutal reminder of climate reality. How much is man-made is uncertain but the change is certain enough. And the self-proclaimed world leader does not lead.

Then, incredible: the fact that 16 percent are in misery and hunger, while one percent live in opulence, feeding on speculation, was drowned in glib talk about the “middle class”. Yes, it is large, and stagnant. But far from 100 percent.

Neither candidate had answers, possibly agreeing to be silent. The U.S. desperately needs more parties that are less afraid of truth (as they will not win anyhow), for democratic transparency, and open dialogue.

Does the election make a difference? What change will the second Barack Obama term bring? Obama said in his victory speech that he will focus on deficit, the taxation system, and immigration. None of the above mentioned issues. In foreign policy Mitt Romney, like George W. Bush, might have been more reckless, accelerating the fall of the empire. Obama, like Bill Clinton, is better informed, more sophisticated, holding up the fall a little longer. And democrats are more inclined to do what Israel wants.

Obamacare will continue, whatever that is worth given the rise in costs for any medical care possibly because the “state will pay”.

On Jan. 1, 2013, the debt ceiling strikes, according to the Congress consensus, with major “austerity” for those who can least afford it, touching the military gently. Misery will accelerate and so could military deployment and wars waged the Obama way, with drones and SEALs, extrajudicial executions.

Imagine a Politburo committee in China studying photos to decide whom to kill abroad for anti-Chinese activity or threats to China’s security. Or China arming Cuba and Haiti countries as close to the U.S. as Taiwan is to China to the teeth; with a fleet cruising in the Caribbean. The U.S. would find this unacceptable.

But Obama will play, “I am above the parties uniting the nation. In his first term he was leaning over backward to the Republicans and was badly punished mid-term; this time that makes Romney a de facto co-president. The Dodd-Frank finance economy reforms will be very bland, Wall Street will by and large continue its lethal games. The rich may be taxed and may find more loopholes including settling abroad. Like the French super-rich in London?

Is U.S. democracy a two-party system becoming a one-party state? If so, other countries beware. Do not imitate. Democracy is more than elections. It is also transparency and dialogue, for real change. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University, is author of “The Fall of the US Empire–And Then What?” ( www.transcend.org/tup)