Who Owns the Thoughts In Your Head?

Tucker Carlson, corporate puppet

In a week notable for explosive media revelations, corporate meltdowns, and weirdness, yesterday’s news about One America News Network (OANN) stood out. Disclosure by Reuters shows that OANN receives about 90% of its operating revenue through AT&T and its subsidiaries grabbed me violently. Yes, that same AT&T, which owns WarnerMedia, home of Ted Turner’s CNN, and also HBO, which broadcasts Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

I can’t stress this enough: this means one umbrella corporation has investments in America’s Conservative, Centrist, and Left-wing media operations. While OANN has cultivated explicit fondness for Donald Trump and conservative nationalism, Oliver has become so influential in leftist circles that observers have described the John Oliver effect. CNN, meanwhile leans incrementally left, but attempts to maintain the traditional illusion of centrist neutrality.

Exactly where each broadcaster leans, however, matters little overall, if they’re beholden to the same corporations. Though AT&T doesn’t own OANN directly, OANN’s dependence on service providers in which Ma Bell owns a controlling interest, means that AT&T functionally owns responsibility for the network. And the same parent corporation has demonstrated it will sell audiences whatever pre-sliced bologna will line their pockets. Fundamentally, the corporation doesn’t care.

In today’s media-saturated environment, most audiences have liberty to select the news source they consider most reliable. This means networks actively court audiences by offering them viewpoints audiences consider trustworthy—which, usually, means selling viewers their own opinions, slightly polished. Telling audiences what they already believe has proven to be a lucrative business model. The creation of mass media conglomerates has made moral backbone optional.

John Oliver, corporate puppet

Most citizens lack resources necessary to find news without a corporate gatekeeper. The accumulation of news sources under owners like William Randolph Hearst or Rupert Murdoch, has meant that we depend on owners’ probity to maintain our information. But both Hearst and Murdoch have proven their probity, um, lacking. Both have long histories of massaging publicly available information to suit their preferred outcomes.

Nor is the problem limited to news.

I remember learning some years ago that somebody owns the Bible. Sort of. Though the best-selling English translation is still the King James (Authorized) Version, which is in public domain, the best-selling translation in contemporary English is the New International Version. And that translation, being a specific arrangement of words, is still under copyright. The NIV Bible belongs to Zondervan, which draws royalties on major text citations and reprints.

Fair enough, but who owns Zondervan? Though founded independently in a farmhouse, Zondervan is currently a subsidiary of HarperCollins, itself a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp. HarperCollins also owns Avon, publisher of Anton Szandor LeVay’s Satanic Bible. The same company sells both sides of the fence. Rejecting religion doesn’t solve the problem; many of public atheist Richard Dawkins’ books are published by Houghton Mifflin, a subsidiary of… HarperCollins.

The corporations we ordinary people depend upon to disseminate morality, democracy, and knowledge, have their fingers in the opposite pie. Though it’s hypothetically possible that these corporations maintain boundaries between their divisions, we essentially have to trust the parent companies that they’ve achieved this. And they haven’t proven themselves wholly trustworthy when they make promises about internal mechanisms.

Rachel Maddow, corporate puppet

One could continue. Two corporations, Molson Coors and AnheuserBusch InBev, control ninety percent of America’s beer production. This includes such putative competitors as Leinenkugel, Shock Top, and Elysian. Though microbrews appear periodically—just like micropublishers and micronewspapers—it doesn’t take long before market forces, high overhead, and a closed market persuade many to sell out or fold. These are just examples; check sources on your favored industry to find more.

The companies that provide the news, religion, and beer we prefer, also probably market the news, religion, and beer we despise. No individual can possible comb the registers to find the connections, and when shopping, no individual brain can recollect the incestuous networks that control our choices. Overwhelmed and under-informed, we resort to the classic fallback position favored by customers throughout history: buying whatever’s convenient, even if it’s openly toxic.

Collective action seems necessary, but I can’t envision what that looks like. We can’t trust the government to regulate this inbred sludge, since the sludge manufacturers bankroll our politicians. It’s tempting to plead for revolution. But considering how Communism collapsed quickly into Stalinism and Maoism, that option becomes equally unappealing. When the state nationalizes the Inbred Sludge Industry, it becomes invested in making more inbred sludge.

Yet I fear the consequences of surrendering to fatalism. What solutions remain? I’ve run out of ideas.