MEDIA BEAT
Ad Industry: Giving Women Equal Treatment
Last fall, when Jean Kilbourne's new book Deadly Persuasion was arriving on shelves, Publishers Weekly praised it as "a wake-up call about the damaging effects of advertising in our media-saturated culture." But six months later, the mass media's fingers remain firmly on the snooze button.
It's hardly surprising that few national media outlets have reviewed the book or interviewed the author. Kilbourne's work is a publicist's nightmare. Imagine trying to get an articulate critic of ads onto TV networks that rely on commercials for their big profits.
"If you're like most people, you think that advertising has no influence on you," Kilbourne writes. "This is what advertisers want you to believe. But, if that were true, why would companies spend over $200 billion a year on advertising?" We end up buying into much more than we purchase, Kilbourne contends, as advertising "sells values, images, and concepts of love and sexuality, romance, success, and, perhaps most important, normalcy.... Far from being a passive mirror of society, advertising is an effective and pervasive medium of influence and persuasion, and its influence is cumulative, often subtle, and primarily unconscious."
In the advertised world, what we can buy is apt to seem more reliable than people. "Again and again, advertising tells us that relationships with human beings are fragile and disappointing but that we can count on our products," Kilbourne comments. She underscores what should be obvious--yet what is constantly obscured by an ad-driven media culture: "Products are only things. No matter how much we love them, they will never love us back."
While the pages of Deadly Persuasion deftly explain how advertising inflicts untold damage on people in all demographic categories, the focus is mostly on the virulent treatment of females. The book's subtitle: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising.
The ad industry, Kilbourne observes, "is one of the most potent messengers in a culture that can be toxic for girls' self-esteem. Indeed, if we looked only at advertising images, this would be a bleak world for females." Even before the start of adolescence, the assault is severe. "The culture, both reflected and reinforced by advertising, urges girls to adopt a false self, to bury alive their real selves..." Public awareness has grown about "the damage done to girls by the tyranny of the ideal image, weightism, and the obsession with thinness," Kilbourne notes. "But girls get other messages too that 'cut them down to size' more subtly. In ad after ad, girls are urged to be 'barely there'--beautiful but silent. Of course, girls are not just influenced by images of other girls. They are even more powerfully attuned to images of women, because they learn from these images what is expected of them, what they are to become."
Manipulation of intimate desires is most deadly on behalf of tobacco companies. Kilbourne points out: "Of all the lies that advertising tells us, the ones told in cigarette ads are the most lethal." In 1979, the targeting of men and women with tobacco ads reached parity. Today, "the only equality with men the advent of women's smoking has given us is that we now are getting lung cancer at the same rate."
Women are commonly deterred from expressing rage. In its place, advertisers offer a cornucopia of products. "Since anger is one of the great taboos for women," says Kilbourne, "we learn to repress anger, and usually to turn it against the self." Although many ads explicitly link buying with resilience and self-assertion, advertising actually undercuts the potential to create positive change. "Girls and women are encouraged to use cigarettes and alcohol to cope with anger and depression and to repress their authentic rebelliousness, all the while deluding themselves that they are being genuinely defiant."
Our society's nonstop deluge of ads is "trivializing human relationships and encouraging us to feel that we are in relationships with our products," Kilbourne writes. But effective resistance is possible: "We can redefine the crucial concepts --love, rebellion, sexuality, friendship, freedom--that advertising has corrupted, and take them back for our own health, power, and fulfillment."
If you read Jean Kilbourne's book (the entire first chapter is posted at <www.deadlypersuasion.com>), the chances are good that you'll deeply appreciate her work to challenge the ad madness that afflicts us all.
Break Up Microsoft? Then How About The Media "Big Six"?
The push by federal regulators to break up Microsoft is big news. Until recently, the software giant seemed untouchable--and few people demanded effective antitrust efforts against monopoly power in the software industry. These days, a similar lack of vision is routine in looking at the media business. Today, just six corporations have a forceful grip on America's mass media. We should consider how to break the hammerlock that huge firms currently maintain around the windpipe of the First Amendment. And we'd better hurry.
The trend lines of media ownership are steep and ominous in the United States. When The Media Monopoly first appeared on bookshelves in 1983, author Ben Bagdikian explains, "50 corporations dominated most of every mass medium." With each new edition, that number kept dropping--to 29 media firms in 1987, 23 in 1990, 14 in 1992, and 10 in 1997.
Published this spring, the sixth edition of The Media Monopoly documents that just a half-dozen corporations are now supplying most of the nation's media fare. And Bagdikian, a longtime journalist, continues to sound the alarm. "It is the overwhelming collective power of these firms, with their corporate interlocks and unified cultural and political values, that raises troubling questions about the individual's role in the American democracy."
I wonder what the chances are that Bagdikian--or anyone else--will be invited onto major TV broadcast networks to discuss the need for vigorous antitrust enforcement against the biggest media conglomerates. Let's see:
·CBS: Not a good bet, especially since its merger with Viacom (one of the Big Six) was announced last fall.
·NBC: Quite unlikely. General Electric, a Big Six firm, has owned NBC since 1986.
·ABC: Forget it. This network became the property of the Disney Co. five years ago. Disney is now the country's second-largest media outfit.
·Fox: The Fox network is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., currently number four in the media oligarchy.
And then there's always cable television, with several networks devoted to news:
·CNN: The world's biggest media conglomerate, Time Warner, owns CNN--where antitrust talk about undue concentration of media power is about as welcome as the Internationale sung at a baseball game in Miami.
·CNBC: Sixth-ranked General Electric owns this cable channel.
·MSNBC: Spawned as a joint venture of GE and Microsoft, the MSNBC network would see activism against media monopoly as double trouble.
·Fox News Channel: The Fox cable programming rarely wanders far from the self-interest of News Corp. tycoon Murdoch.
Since all of those major TV news sources are owned by one of the Big Six, the chances are mighty slim that you'll be able to catch a discussion of media antitrust issues on national television.
Meanwhile, the only Big Sixer that doesn't possess a key US television outlet--the Bertelsmann firm based in Germany--is the most powerful company in the book industry. It owns the mammoth publisher Random House, and plenty more in the media universe. Bertelsmann "is the world's third largest conglomerate," Bagdikian reports, "with substantial ownership of magazines, newspapers, music, television, on-line trading, films, and radio in 53 countries." Try pitching a book proposal to a Random House editor about the dangers of global media consolidation.
Well, you might comfort yourself by thinking about cyberspace. Think again. The dominant Internet service provider, America Online, is combining with already-number-one Time Warner--and the new firm AOL Time Warner would have more to lose than any other corporation if a movement grew to demand antitrust action against media conglomerates. Amid rampant overall commercialization of the most heavily trafficked websites, AOL steers its 22 million subscribers in many directions--and, in the future, Time Warner's offerings will be most frequently highlighted. While seeming to be gateways to a vast cybergalaxy, AOL's favorite links will remain overwhelmingly corporate friendly within a virtual cul-de-sac.
Hype about the New Media seems boundless, while insatiable old hungers for maximum profits fill countless screens. Centralization is the order of the media day. As Bagdikian points out: "The power and influence of the dominant companies are understated by counting them as 'six.' They are intertwined: they own stock in each other, they cooperate in joint media ventures, and among themselves they divide profits from some of the most widely viewed programs on television, cable, and movies."
We may not like the nation's gigantic media firms, but right now they don't care much what we think. A strong antitrust movement aimed at the Big Six could change such indifference in a hurry.