baywatch instead of democracy

[Guest guest]

Thanks To Corporations...

Instead Of Democracy

We Got Baywatch

It was claimed that the internet and satellite TV would

topple dictators, but commercial interest are making sure

they don't

By George Monbiot

The Guardian (UK)

9-12-5

 

" Several of this cursed brood, getting hold of the branches

behind, leaped up into the tree, whence they began to

discharge their excrements on my head. " Thus Gulliver

describes his first encounter with the s. Something

similar seems to have happened to democracy.

 

In April, Shi Tao, a journalist working for a Chinese

newspaper, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for

" providing state secrets to foreign entities " . He had passed

details of a censorship order to the Asia Democracy Forum

and the website Democracy News.

 

The pressure group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) was

mystified by the ease with which Mr Tao had been caught. He

had sent the message through an anonymous account.

But the police had gone straight to his offices and picked

him up. How did they know who he was?

 

Last week RSF obtained a translation of the verdict, and

there they found the answer. Mr Tao's account information

was " furnished by Holdings " . , the document

says, gave the government his telephone number and the

address of his office.

 

So much for the promise that the internet would liberate the

oppressed. This theory was most clearly formulated in 1999

by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. In his book

The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman argues that two great

democratising forces -- global communications and global

finance -- will sweep away any regime which is not open,

transparent and democratic.

 

" Thanks to satellite dishes, the internet and television, "

he asserts, " we can now see through, hear through and look

through almost every conceivable wall. . . . no one owns the

internet, it is totally decentralised, no one can turn it

off . . . China's going to have a free press . . . Oh,

China's leaders don't know it yet, but they are being pushed

straight in that direction. " The same thing, he claims, is

happening all over the world. In Iran he saw people ogling

Baywatch on illegal satellite dishes. As a result, he

claims, " within a few years, every citizen of the world will

be able to comparison shop between his own . . . government

and the one next door " .

 

He is partly right. The internet at least has helped to

promote revolutions of varying degrees of authenticity in

Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Argentina and

Bolivia. But the flaw in Friedman's theory is that he

forgets the intermediaries. The technology which runs the

internet did not sprout from the ground. It is provided by

people with a commercial interest in its development. Their

interest will favour freedom in some places and control in

others. And they can and do turn it off.

 

In 2002 signed the Chinese government's pledge of

" self-regulation " : it promised not to allow " pernicious

information that may jeopardise state security " to be

posted. Last year Google published a statement admitting

that it would not be showing links to material banned by the

authorities on computers stationed in China. If Chinese

users of Microsoft's internet service MSN try to send a

message containing the words " democracy " , " liberty " or

" human rights " , they are warned that " This message includes

forbidden language. Please delete the prohibited expression. "

 

A study earlier this year by a group of scholars called the

OpenNet Initiative revealed what no one had thought

possible: that the Chinese government is succeeding in

censoring the net. Its most powerful tool is its control of

the routers -- the devices through which data is moved from

one place to another. With the right filtering systems,

these routers can block messages containing forbidden words.

Human-rights groups allege that western corporations -- in

particular Cisco Systems -- have provided the technology and

the expertise. Cisco is repeatedly cited by Thomas Friedman

as one of the facilitators of his global revolution.

 

" We had the dream that the internet would free the world,

that all the dictatorships would collapse, " says Julien Pain

of Reporters Without Borders. " We see it was just a dream. "

 

Friedman was not the first person to promote these dreams.

In 1993 Rupert Murdoch boasted that satellite television was

" an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere " .

The Economist had already made the same claim on its cover:

" Dictators beware! " The Chinese went berserk, and Murdoch,

in response, ensured that the threat did not materialise.

 

In 1994, he dropped BBC world news from his Star satellite

feeds after it broadcast an unflattering portrait of Mao

Zedong. In 1997 he ordered his publishing house

HarperCollins to drop a book by Chris Patten, the former

governor of Hong Kong. He slagged off the Dalai Lama and his

son James attacked the dissident cult Falun Gong. His

grovelling paid off, and in 2002 he was able to start

broadcasting into Guangdong. " We won't do programmes that

are offensive in China, " Murdoch's spokesman Wang Yukui

admitted. " If you call this self-censorship then of course

we're doing a kind of self-censorship. "

 

I think, if they were as honest as Mr Wang, everyone who

works for Rupert Murdoch, or for the corporate media

anywhere in the world, would recognise these restraints. To

own a national newspaper or a television or radio station

you need to be a multimillionaire. What multimillionaires

want is what everybody wants: a better world for people like

themselves. The job of their journalists is to make it

happen. As Piers Morgan, the former editor of the Mirror,

confessed, " I've made it a strict rule in life to ingratiate

myself with billionaires. " They will stay in their jobs for

as long as they continue to interpret the interests of the

proprietorial class correctly.

 

What the owners don't enforce, the advertisers do. Over the

past few months, http://AdAge.com reveals, both Morgan

Stanley and BP have instructed newspapers and magazines that

they must remove their adverts from any edition containing

" objectionable editorial coverage " . Car, airline and tobacco

companies have been doing the same thing. Most publications

can't afford to lose these accounts; they lose the offending

articles instead. Why are the papers full of glowing

profiles of the advertising boss Martin Sorrell? Because

they're terrified of him.

 

So instead of democracy we get Baywatch. They are not the

same thing. Aspirational TV might stimulate an appetite for

more money or more plastic surgery, and this in turn might

encourage people to look, for better or worse, to the

political systems that deliver them, but it is just as

likely to be counter-democratic. As a result of pressure

from both ratings and advertisers, for example, between 1993

and 2003 environmental programmes were cleared from the

schedules on BBC TV, ITV and Channel 4. Though three or four

documentaries have slipped out since then, the ban has not

yet been wholly lifted. To those of us who have been banging

our heads against this wall, it feels like censorship.

 

Indispensable as the internet has become, political debate

is still dominated by the mainstream media: a story on the

net changes nothing until it finds its way into the

newspapers or on to TV. What this means is that while the

better networking Friedman celebrates can assist a

democratic transition, the democracy it leaves us with is

filtered and controlled. Someone else owns the routers.

 

http://www.monbiot.com

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1568479,00.html

 

 

 

I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can still do

something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the

something that I can do.