New documentary #killswitch exposes media consolidation and government collusion
Everyone who is a regular to Hacker News knows we have a culture of corruption in Washington and are in desperate need of media reform and legislation protecting Net Neutrality. So, why does mainstream media ignore the massive amounts of corruption and collusion between large corporations and big government, while also ignoring the issues of Net Neutrality and media reform? Simply put, the mainstream media has much to lose and nothing to gain in opening up this can of worms. In fact, the largest media conglomerates in the United States are among the most influential players in American government and benefit substantially from their political connections and an American public that’s generally unaware of what’s going on behind the media curtain.
One of the biggest corruptive practices in American policy over the past 30 years has been the unregulated merging of the media conglomerates. The Big Six (General Electric, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom, and CBS) have become so large that the vast majority of what most Americans see, hear, or read has either been produced in their film studios, broadcast on their television stations, printed in their magazines, heard on their radio stations, transported through their broadband, or read on their websites. This monopolization of media power has not only been unchecked by the U.S. government, it is actually promoted. It wasn’t always this way. Our founding fathers knew that an independent and diverse media was essential to a functioning democracy. They knew that in a democracy, knowledge and information couldn’t be controlled by only a handful of professional print makers. Instead, there needed to be dozens of different venues where Americans could report and receive the news. The U.S. government promoted this diversity and vitality by heavily subsidizing the media in the first 100 years after the birth of our country. In fact, there was great consensus in support of these massive subsidies, regardless of political party. Political leaders from Jefferson and Madison to Hamilton and Adams all agreed that government-funded subsidies were essential to a vibrant and diverse media. The U.S. government did not favor one form of political content over another. All newspapers, regardless of political content (conservative or liberal), were treated equally by the U.S. Post Office (which was essentially the Internet of the late 18th and 19th centuries), and all news was delivered throughout the nation at a special subsidized rate, costing the print makers next to nothing to send information out to the broad American electorate. As a result of the Post Office subsidies, news papers flourished in our nation’s first 100 years. It was quite common in this era to have dozens of independent newspapers delivered to every major town across the country. American citizens were well informed and possessed many choices for news content and political perspective.
Flash forward to the year 2011. Most cities and towns are fortunate to have two competing newspapers, much less two dozen. Television and radio ownership is even more alarmingly concentrated in the United States. It is simply not in the interests of the Big Six to spend any time discussing the moral hazards of this monopolization. Instead, they continue to merge without much debate, dialogue, or criticism in congress, amongst the American people, or of course, the traditional media itself. We do, however, have the Internet, where alternative media and consumer rights groups thrive and attempt to hold the politically and economically powerful accountable. But alas, these same media conglomerates are now looking to dominate the Internet, and are increasingly successful in doing so. In January of this year, the largest media company in the United States, NBC-Universal (owned by GE), merged with the largest ISP, Comcast, to become the biggest vertically-integrated media conglomerate in the history of the United States. (Suspiciously, neither, NBC-Universal nor its news affiliates provided much coverage of the deal…) The merger was blessed by the FCC despite warnings from numerous consumer rights groups and academics. These groups rightly feared that if ISPs owned content, they would be tempted to give it preferential treatment over competing content. They also argued that NBC-Comcast would be commercially incentivized to impede or block the flow of content and information from competitors. Not surprisingly, no one in the traditional media lifted an eyebrow when FCC Commissioner Meredith Baker resigned her position to become the top lobbyist for Comcast shortly after lobbying to expedite its merger with NBC four months prior. We have seen this collusion between big government and big industry in every regulatory agency in Washington; top government officials routinely cash out to become executives at the agencies they were “regulating” in the first place. Then, after making millions in the private sector, they go back to “regulating” their buddies again. The documentaries Food Inc. and Inside Job have done excellent jobs of describing this phenomenon in the food and banking industries. But after over 30 years of corruption, kickbacks, and mergers, the full-length documentary exposing this behavior in our media industry has yet to be made.
There are nearly 300 million Americans who have to learn about and get involved in these issues. The best way to do this is through education and awareness. We must speak the language of the people, which is television and film. Unfortunately, as you know, the Big Six are the gate keepers of these industries. But that doesn’t have to be the case. With crowd-funding, we can turn this hierarchy upside down and give the language back to the people. I, along with many of my friends and a film production company called Akorn Entertainment, are trying to do just that. We’re creating a full length documentary film that aims to expose the widespread political corruption between the media industry and government. It’s called #killswitch (link). #killswitch is an in-depth, highly analytical and entertaining documentary that will attempt to make sense of the issues concerning the media, Internet, and democracy in the 21st century. In the course of the film, Akorn will interview a wide array of academics, activists, and citizens as well as political and business elites in order to get an in depth and entertaining analysis of where we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re heading. Our goal is for #killswitch to be funded entirely by individuals, since citizens have the most to gain or lose in the battle over the Internet. To see our trailer and our current fundraising, check out our (kickstarter page - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/akorn/killswitch-a-documentary-film?ref=live. Read our treatment and check out more details about our project here: www.killswitchthefilm.com. For a sampling of previous work our film company has done, click here: www.akorn.tv. We look forward to partnering with YOU in creating a film that educates and informs the American public on these important issues. Sources for this article include: Bagdikian, Ben. The Media Monopoly Free Press. <http://www.freepress.net/ownership/chart/main> Lessig, Lawrence. Remix McChesney, Robert and John Nichols. The Death and Life of American Journalism. Morozov, Evgeny. The Net Delusion Wu, Tim. The Master Switch