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So what's the big
deal about censorship? Who cares that the Pacific
Daily News censors columnists who criticize the
paper or advocate different ideas? We should all
care. It's a very big deal that affects all of our
lives.
The PDN has made
the decision to censor not only my columns on two
occassions, but several other columnists, notably
John Wittmayer, a journalism professor at the
University of Guam. Wittmayer, who was one of the
only columnists in the PDN who diverged from
acceptable mainstream opinions, was fired
ostensibly for reasons of "diversity" (read: he's a
white male). Unfortunately, the PDN missed the
point of diversity completely: it should encourage
diversity in ideas, not just in ethnicity. Having a
columnist of every ethnicity but not having any
ideas that differ from the paper's is not
diversity.
The problem here
runs very deep. It starts with Guam's main
newspaper forgetting to apply the principles of
free speech to itself that it applies to the rest
of the local community. The erosion of the
principle of free speech in the very paper that
should champion the issue is a cause for alarm in
itself.
That's just the
start, though. The real danger lies in the
narrowing of the spectrum of ideas that the public
has access to. The PDN, which most people on Guam
rely on for information, is in effect putting
blinders on the public. When we are only allowed to
see one color of ideas, we end up looking down a
narrow tunnel and not realizing that there's an
entire universe outside of that tunnel.
Take capitalism,
for example. Our society, including mainstream
media such as the PDN, cannot talk about anything
outside the borders of capitalism and what's good
for business. Once you mention that maybe we need
to think about the needs of the community, about
the lives of the working class, and that maybe,
just maybe, the dollar shouldn't always come first,
you stray from what is considered the realm of
acceptable ideas. When Wittmayer suggested that the
ideas of capitalism aren't in alignment with the
values of Christianity, the PDN let him go. When
thousands of protesters in Washington D.C.,
Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Sydney, Australia
protested passionately about the problems of global
capitalism, the PDN refused to mention that they
were protesting capitalism and only mentioned their
arrests by police.
The list goes on.
When the Democratic and Republican presidential
candidates trip over each other trying to serve the
interests of big business and "free trade" (a
misnomer if there ever was one), they get large
headlines in the PDN, but when Ralph Nader talks
about reigning in the immense power of the
corporations in favor of more power to the public,
he merits a tiny story perhaps once a week. Any
person who questions the dogma of capitalism is not
only liable to be labeled a "pinko" or "commie",
but is very unlikely to make it into the
PDN.
Capitalism is only
one example of how mainstream corporate media such
as the PDN limit our thinking without our realizing
it, but it's a telling example. It's also not at
all surprising. Respected intellectual Noam
Chomsky, a linguistics professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a leading
political dissident, is among numerous people
who've written about the effects of corporate
ownership and sponsorship of the media. Chomsky,
whose mind-opening writings can be found at the
Zmag Chomsky
Archive,
writes that numerous factors (including corporate
ownership of the media, corporate sponsorship of
the media, and business-sympathizing media
management and reporters) cause the mainstream
media to be extremely limiting in the spectrum of
ideas available to the public, and examines the
disastrous effects that has on public
policy.
Journalism Norman
Solomon, among others, has written books and
columns (including his excellent column for
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting called
Media Beat) about the incredible
concentration of corporate ownership of the
mainstream media in the United States.
Solomon wrote a few
months ago about the latest version of Ben
Bagdikian's book, "The Media Monopoly," which has
documented the shrinking number of corporations
that dominate the mass media (50 corporations in
1983, 29 in 1987, 10 in 1997 and now only six
corporations control most of the media). Those six
are (not in order): Viacom (owns CBS, Paramount,
Blockbuster, MTV networks and others), General
Electric (NBC, CNBC, MSNBC), Disney (ABC), Time
Warner (CNN, Time magazine, Warner Bros., and
combining with AOL), News Corp. (Fox), and
Bertelsmann (a German international giant that
doesn't own a U.S. television network but owns
Random House).
Solomon advocates
an antitrust lawsuit against the media monopolies,
which are all intertwined: "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."
I'm not as
enthusiastic about an antitrust lawsuit, only
because I don't like to rely on the government for
solutions. I think people need to speak up on this,
and the public itself should break up the
monopolies. The public should form and support more
decentralized, broad-ranging alternative media.
Employee-run, collective media seem to me to be the
best models. That's the beauty of the Internet --
it gives people more choices, and small media
organizations that normally wouldn't reach people
all over the nation are now more accessible.
To get outside of
the mainstream media and find alternative ideas,
try Z Magazine, The Nation, and Mother Jones, just for starters. In the
meantime, you can write to the PDN's managing
editor, Rindrati Celes (rlimtiaco@guampdn.com), to let her know what you
think about the PDN's censorship and its narrowing
of the public's access to differing ideas.
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