The Elite-Controlled Mass Media

My interest in researching who really controls our media and how it affects the military-corporate complex grew immensely upon reading an essay by Gore Vidal entitled “Mickey Mouse, Historian” which originally appeared in The Nation in 1996.

On June 3, 1996, The Nation showed in a foldout chart how most of the US media are now owned by a handful of corporations. Several attractive octopi decorated the usually chaste pages of this journal. The most impressive of these cephalod molluscs was that headed by Disney-ABC, taking precedence over the lesser Time Warner, General Electric-NBC, and Westinghouse Corporation calamari, from which dangle innumerable tentacles representing television (network and cable), weapons factories (GE aircraft engines and nuclear turbines) and, of course, GNA and other insurance firms unfriendly to health care reform.

Today I spent quite a bit of time researching this issue. What finally struck me is that the websites I was referred to over and over again as being the seminal sources for what I was after no longer exist.

The first was the Project on Media Ownership (PrOMO) at New York University. Their website was www.promo.org, which is now a website with nothing but links for promotion and advertising. I searched the NYU website and found nothing. Apparently not only is the website gone, but the entire project seems to have been over for a while. I have to ask, why? The situation is not that there is no longer a need for it. On the contrary, the situation of the media being controlled by the military-corporate complex is one about which people need to be informed.

The second website I looked for was www.americanresurrection.com, which domain is now for sale. Index on Censorship (www.indexonline.org) describes AR as, “The hard hitting website [that] takes no prisoners in the fight against an ‘elite-controlled mass media’.” Where did it go?

I was able to collect bits and pieces of information from different sources, but I was not able to locate anything with all of the power I wanted. I would have liked to have found a diagram of who owns what or exactly how specific media outlets are connected to the arms industry. In addition, all of the information I did find was slightly out of date. I could have missed something, certainly, but I am a good internet researcher and if something is out there (and most things are), I do not need hours and hours to find them.

Even Wikipedia let me down. There is an entry for Mark Crispin Miller, who is/was the director of PrOMO, but it is four lines long + a bibliography and one quote. The entry mentions PrOMO, but there is no hyperlink. I found two results on Blog Search, but neither of the links worked.

Draw your own conclusions. I leave you now with the single quote from Mark Crispin Miller: “Big brother is you, watching.”