ARTelevision

Some conservatives, such as myself for example, are highly critical of the media but not in the Chomsky-esque manner you refer to here.

There are some significant threads on TFP that refer to media studies as being crucial to our survival as thinking critically-minded individuals. So we can agree on the necessity for this.

What we won't be agreeing on is all of your conclusions, implicit or explicit.

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roachboy

i would be interested to see what, if any, methodologies you might be using to disagree, art.

or is your disagreement a function of premises that you import into the situation and which are not amenable to argument?

if the latter, then there really is no point in conversation, because you have decided the matter before any work has occurred and are not willing to submit your position to debate out of fear that it might be falsified.

in which case you are obviously free to say when and where you like that you have the vague sense that "the media" does not function as you would like, but these statements are about your aesthetic, not an object in the world.

btw i think that the chomsky model simplifies things by making a too-easy link between the fact of ownership and the content of ideology---but this is a different conversation....

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ARTelevision

Concepts such as "power-elites" and "true left" as used here for example:

"To paraphrase Chomsky, it is actually within the power-elites interest to have a media establishment recognized as left leaning. This insulates them from criticism from the true left."

are so loaded as to be moot.

Who exactly are the power-elites? What exactly is the true left?

Terms like these load the discussion to the degree that all those who do not operate with doctrinaire definitions of such concepts are left scratching their heads. When it comes time to arrive at conclusions about arguments that invoke such ideas, only the already-convinced are convinced.

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roachboy

ah yes--the problem with posting to a board is that your position gets garbled with those of others. i actually do not use categories like those you cite because they function as you say they do--define particular variables/interest groups before any analysis has actually been done and lets you write them into what you are doing as necessary features. also, such terms function as pretexts for folk who are inclined to swat away this kind of work without taking it seriously.

so say, art, that we agree on the semantic matters you raise.
you still haven't said anything about how your counter analysis might be organized==what its premises might be, what material you look at, and how you draw conclusions to support your position (as i understand it)----are you looking to people like reed irvine for support? that appears to me to be the case, but i dont know for sure. what exactly constitutes this thing called "liberal bias" for you? are you simply repeating the conventional wisdom of the am radio right, or are you thinking of some particular features?

it would be nice if you took the question seriously, rather than trying to divert the matter onto something ancillary. it would be nice to be able to have a real conversation with a conservative on this kind of thing--you dont seem a fool, so all the more reason to see if you would like to actually talk about the questions you raise.

btw, dont waste your effort defending a notion of objectivity--the only objective proposition is that there is nothing objective. we could talk about that if you like, but i think it a straw man. what we are talking about is cultural conflict. cultural power comes from controlling the frame of reference. at this point in the states, conservative discourse is the dominant frame of reference. how individuals self-identify is irrelevant--positions are constantly rearticulated across shifts in frame of reference, but these positions say nothing about news products either in themselves (professionalism obliges) or about the terms used a lingua franca to order information. self-identifications might indicate a particular, conflicted indivdual relation to that frame, but it would not necessarily effect how stories are organized, what categories they use to stream factoids--and even if individual conflicts did surface within a given story, that story circulates as a single element in a stream of similar elements and deviations tend to get smoothed away.

so what exactly are you talking about?

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ARTelevision

My thoughts on media are too extensive to encapsulate here. I may at some point attempt an encapsulation but I have avoided making the (obvious) connections between media and politics in most of my analyses.

That's why I was terse in my response. It was not because I do not take the subject seriously.

Check this thread:

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...=&threadid=911

There's more an attitude of questioning that I engage in as regards media than there is one of drawing conclusions.

I do believe there are important effects of media that affect our political thinking. Again, it's a very large subject. I didn't want to hijack this thread and so assumed, apparently incorrectly in this case, that my thoughts regarding media are well enough known here.

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roachboy

huh--this is an interesting thread you link to--i'll have to read it more extensively. thanks. i'll write something once i've read through it.....

a drawback to the "rookie" status that still follows me around, i guess.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

paulybrklynny

roachboy,
I don't want to distract you from goading ART into a discussion he seems reticent to participate in after originating it.

However, I would argue, though like ART I am hesitant to continue it at much length, that the Chomsky model tieing ownership to content is the only possible solution. Economic motivations, in my mind are the true motivations behind all the "isms" of history.

Those with the ability to shape opinion do so in order to guard their wealth. To assume otherwise is to give credence to other motivations, such as good/evil. I truly think things are much simpler than any grand sweeps of ideology, and the "follow the money" rule works pretty much without fail. I would be interested to hear what in your opinion besides economic factors could be responsible for content.

To answer both of you in regards to generalizations. I apologize if my use of terms was unclear, though I actually see a semantic criticism as generally not worth responding to, other than to clarify.

"Power-elite", may be be a "loaded" term, but in my usage I don't think its too unclear. Basicaly, those individuals and organizations able and willing to draw upon their inherent advantages in our society to mantain and extend those advanatges. Which, broadly defined is all of us, however in terms of the mass media it is quite obviously the news-makers, presenters, and advertisers who all have a vested interest in what we the people read and see. Thus, while I, or you may act out of self motivation, the power-elite, are those with the economic or relationship capital to actually exert influence.

As for true left, I don't veew this as a loaded term at all, but if you require a definition: I refer to myself, for example. Within the accepted boundries of ideological debate in this country a very centrist (I would say center-right) mindset has been set up (acheived?) the opposition position to the right.

I don't feel the Democratic party, or the op-ed page of the New York Times represents a progressive, left ideology. Critics of the Democratic party, and of the media, from the left, would thus be identifiable within this example as 'true left'.

You could certainly argue that this is still just a lable, and that anyone left of me could also claim to be true-left. My leftwing ideology, not "left enough" However, this is unnecessary as I dont claim the title as an honorific, just as a means of seperating myself (and those whose views I appreciate and agree with) from those other organizations and individuals who have been annointed as left or liberal, and yet fail to represent my interests (or those of the greater good-if I may make a value judgement).

roachboy

wasnt trying to goad anyone, really--i was curious.

anyway--the problem at this point with collapsing ideology into ownership is that it doesnt let you account for fluctuations in the former---and it doesnt let you think about the complexity of the notion of ownership for publicly held corporations in the context of the international strade in stock, for example. that there would be links between corporate interests and the infrastructure that delivers ideological messages is clear enough--the infrastructure should appear neutral, and legitimates itself through service delivery. the interest in apparent neutrality enables the frame of reference that structures messages within it to fluctuate.

what i found interesting in chomsky is close to what i find interesting in bourdieu's analyses of various media outlets--the outlines of a functioning of hegemony that requires no particular conspiracy---hegemony that articulates and reartucltes its premises through the social conflicts that shape discourse, in the patterns of reproduction of the labor pool, etc. you might say that the present fascism-lite is good for business, but that doesnt let you think about the ways in which that fascism-lite came to be coherent both in itself and for an audience--and if you skip over that, then you undercut the possibilities of a "war of position" as gramsci called it--and if there is a space for a left politics at this point, it would be in war of position.

while i might agree that "in the last analysis" economic interests shape the whole game, it is neither analytically or politically relevant to assume that up front and skip over the modes of social conflict that shape particular contents and the modes of being in the world shaped by them. marxist analysis was dogged by this tendency for the whole of its history.

example: the protection of wealth is equally possible in a context of social-democratic state organization and neoliberal state organization. which option to choose then? that would be a function of the dominant political frame of reference---in a period of transition or uncertainty--and globalizing captialism is certainly both, the reorganization of economic power is unsettling for the holders of capital, as it is for the people who sell their labor power---it makes sense to depoliticize economic relations by privatizing what were previously state functions, say. but that option would not be available had it not been for the thatcher-reagan period and the ideological offensive launched during that period and continued thereafter. between world war 2 and the early 1970s, for example, trade unions were wholly part of the capitalist status quo--now the political situation has been changed and the status of trade unions is problematic at best---so it is politically ok for firms to orient themselves toward locating facilities in the most repressive possible regimes in the interest of the lowest possible costs---the shift is political, not structural--in other words it is a function of a change in the discourse that orders politics, a shift carried out by particular institutions using particular tactics at a particular time--a shift with a history that is interesting in itself. capital does not directly create the ideological framework within which it operates--it is constrained by it.
{there is more to say here, but i am running short of time....sorry)

the power elite--the vance packard term from the 1950s--was tied to particular modes of distribution of economic power--it presupposed a nation-bound trade in stocks, for example.

true left--well, that i sympathize with as a term, but i wouldnt use it myself. i think that the left as a coherent political formation has imploded--it is being followed in slow motion by the right as well---the field is open for rethinking the basic questions that underpinned left politics---which is one reason i am interested in trying to think about questions of cutlural politics (for lack of a better term) in the present situation that does not revert straight away to pinning everything on an abstract notion of ownership. that no existing organizations express the interests of people interested in such a project is no surprise.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ARTelevision

roachboy, your contributions are a valuable addition to the dialog here. Thanks.

My own sense of this, broadly, is that everyone has a degree of wealth and a degree of power. I agree with the notion that humans act from a basis of self-interest regarding wealth and power relationships. No disagreement there.

I do sense a sort of demarcation that gets drawn between certain groups with wealth and power and other groups with wealth and power. As all parts of the political spectrum participate in the same executions of wealth-and-power consolidation, the tendency to draw doctrinaire conclusions regarding the superiority, moral imperative, or correctness of one group over another does not convince me.

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