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Willem Van Lancker - Global Media Final Project

Global Advertising Media: History & Theory

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The History of Modern Advertising

In the early 20th Century, Advertising was not a significant facet of global media. In Europe, advertising was limited to posters and newspapers and focused on the image, portrayed in bold, eye-catching airbrushed posters promoting everything from cigarettes to vacations. These were known largely as object posters, designated thus, based on the fact that they focused solely on featuring an object to be sold, its name, and very little else. In the United States, where industry was still founded on notions of survival and not extravagant aspirations of achieving a higher socioeconomic status, advertising lacked enthusiasm and the industry was peopled mostly with technicians and not brilliant intellectuals or creatives. It was the widespread view that all products being offered in the market were the for the most part of equal quality and selection was mostly driven by location and availability. This led to print advertising that was mostly text heavy and lacking in any true art direction or originality.

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Posted by Willem Van Lancker at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here's a happy little addendum to my literature on media consolidation: Rupert Murdoch's News Corp just announced today that it has withdrawn its bid to buy Newsday from the Tribune Company. News Corp already owns two major papers and two tv stations in the New York market, not to mention hundreds of holdings in different media all over the world. The likely buyer is Cablevision, a cable and broadband provider based mostly on the East Coast.

Posted by Jessica Kerry at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (115)

After more than anyone’s fair share of technical problems (stolen computer, problems with logging into the blog), here it is – my belated “review” of Al Jazeera.

I watched a combination of Al Jazeera live broadcasts and clips on its YouTube site, with an eye for comparison with American broadcast news. The first things I noticed about Al Jazeera were mainly aesthetic: There are no omnipresent corner graphics to remind you what channel you are watching, or to designate whether you are observing “local,” “nation-wide,” or “international” news. The swirling clouds of color that indicate a change in topic are kept to a minimum. There’s little thunderous music, and few attention-grabbing declaratory headlines of the kind that resemble Microsoft WordArt on patriotic steroids. One of few similarities: the English language anchor delivers the news against the backdrop of the US Capital Building.

American officials have accused Al Jazeera of being “sensationalist” because the network is less squeamish than its American counterparts about showing scenes of violence and carnage, particularly in Iraq and Palestine. Yet stylistically, Al Jazeera is cleaner, more minimalist, less bombastic, less spectacular than mainstream American news, and for the most part, its style of reportage follows suit. If American broadcast news is held captive by the society of the spectacle, perhaps the news itself is spectacle enough for Al Jazeera’s English language viewers.

In his book Voices of the New Arab Public, Marc Lynch credits Al Jazeera with permanently changing Arab political discourse, and with creating a “new Arab public” that prefers frank discussion, opposing viewpoints, global focus and the occasional human interest story to the unadulterated Arabist rhetoric and the anti-critical state-sponsored Arab news outlets of the 1990’s. Al Jazeera’s outward-focused English-language segments display all of these things, and provide ample historical, political, and economic context to each story reported. Footage of pro-China rallies in Paris and pro-independence Tibetan demonstrations in India are shown side by side as Al Jazeera traces the global progress of the Olympic flame. A report on murdered and missing women in a US-Mexican border town features interviews with their mothers, and an investigation into labor conditions in the large factories where the women once worked. A report on air pollution in Daka, the capital of Bangladesh, plants blame on industry leaders, lax environmental laws, and ineffectual environmentalists alike. (Al Gore would be proud.) These broadcasts clearly aim to attract, and perhaps to form, a well-informed, critically thinking public with minimal idealistic bent.

I’m more interested, though, in Al Jazeera’s coverage of, and relationship with, its home base, the vaguely defined and hardly cohesive Arab world. According to Marc Lynch, the Arab response to Al Jazeera has been overwhelmingly positive, as evidenced by high confidence measured by public opinion polls and a host of alternate “pan-Arab” news outlets that have sprung up in the past five years to lend Al Jazeera the ultimate form of flattery. This trend of regionally-focused rather than state-based media, though, inevitably confronts problems of identity, in defining itself, and in defining its audience. We might ask: what kind of coverage allows Al Jazeera to self- identify as a – perhaps as the – Arab news outlet?

Al Jazeera attracts and maintains its audience by covering issues pertinent to Arab life in a way that at once shapes and challenges the Arab mindset(s). News coverage, panel discussions, and call-in talk shows are all part of this equation. Al Jazeera also builds credibility with its listenership through extensive coverage of stories that are sure to resonate with the majority of the network’s intended audience; these are issues that most of the Arab world can get behind, and feel good about getting behind, and feel a certain solidarity with other Arabs, and other viewers, who also get behind. So on a broader level, Al Jazeera very much caters to its target audience, much like al-Minar speaks to the Shia Islamists of Lebanon and state-run Syrian media panders to the Alawite elite allied with the Assad family. But it does so, I’ve found, without losing its critical eye, and this is what sets Al Jazeera apart from its more unabashedly slanted counterparts.

Perhaps the best example of this is Al Jazeera’s coverage of Palestine. Al Jazeera covers Palestine-related issues – the “peace process,” the economic collapse of Gaza – extensively and sympathetically. An article on the prospects for the right of return for Palestinian refugees declares “there are at least four-and-a-half million reasons why peace continues to elude the Middle East.” A broadcast on an Israeli incursion into Gaza begins “it was, quite literally, a bloodbath.” Yet a panel discussion on the Oslo Accords mainly places blame for their failure on Yassir Arafat, and a discussion with two (American) “specialists” speculates on whether or not Jimmy Carter’s efforts to involve Hamas in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations with be successful, or helpful to the process. Perhaps most strikingly, Al Jazeera also recently aired a short form documentary on the lives of IDF foot soldiers called “One Shot” which shows the young conscripts (though not their political bosses) in a sympathetic light. This kind of coverage suggests a nuanced, if not quite “objective,” approach to such a deeply resonant cause, and defies the American conception of Al Jazeera as a radical and one-sided news outlet.

Through constant and connected coverage of events in the Arab world, Marc Lynch tells us, Al Jazeera works towards building a “common Arab narrative,” or a collective understanding of which trends and issues affect today’s Arab populations. This narrative, in turn, informs a certain Arab political identity, which goes beyond the common ties of language, religion, and culture. Yet the very concept of an “Arab political identity” is rife with contradiction, and often detached from actual policy and leadership. And it has a troubled past. The Arab Nationalist movement of the mid twentieth century, which sought to translate the common cultural and historical heritage of the Arab world into political unity, culminated in the creation of the Arab League, the brief unification of Egypt and Syria into the United Arab Republic, and several other attempts to federate multiple states under political or religious pretense. But lasting Arab unity, the way leaders like Nasser had envisioned it, failed due to fundamental problems in the framework within which it was meant to develop. For one thing, the policies meant to bring about this unity were conceived and carried out by a small minority of Arab leaders and cooperative intellectuals; this was a unity of elites, not an identity available to Arab publics in general. Moreover, there existed no structure for dealing with internal dissension among these “united” entities, and disagreement over contentious issues such as policy towards Israel, the role of political Islam, and relationships with external powers were ultimately insurmountable. Nearly half a century later, and in light of this year’s ill-conceived Arab League Summit in Damascus (belittled by several major states and boycotted completely by Lebanon), Al Jazeera itself (barometer of Arab mood) has inaugurated a 9-part series on the future of Arab unity, the title piece of which begins with the question, “Has the dream of Arab unity run out of steam?”

In addition, a major criticism of Arab identity, then and now, is that it has largely negative origins - that is to say, the “Arab world” is united only in opposition to the hostile forces of imperialism, globalization, Israel, America, what have you. The Arab world, as well as the media that represents it, is often painted in this way by American sources, and in its more radical moments, it defines itself as such (think of Sayid Qutb’s denouncements of the ignorant unIslamic world (jahiliyya), or more obviously, everything Bin Laden). Marc Lynch tells us that Al Jazeera’s precursors, the “old” Arab media, found it easy to garner support by rallying against the “enemies” of the Arab world, rather than pursuing the more difficult task of turning its critical eye inward.

Against such precedent, the task of fomenting a critical yet cohesive collective Arab psyche – positively, no less – is no small feat. Yet the idea that such a “New Arab Public” may be based, this time, on a supranational structure (a multimedia outlet) rather than any coalition of states or political bosses is promising. What’s most striking about Al Jazeera, then, is not the type of reporting that it performs but rather the space that it has created, where officials, “intellectuals,” and members of the formerly loud-but-voiceless “Arab street” can meet and argue as never before. (Though whether this has, or will, usher in a new era of accountability of transparency remains to be seen.) Because it transcends the state system and (potentially) involves a large percentage of this new “public” in its dialogue, this network seems poised to succeed where the Arab Nationalists failed - namely, in fomenting a common identity and loose political solidarity that can define, through common discourse rather than common enemy, what it means to be Arab.

In order to set itself apart from the “old” Arab unity, and the “old” Arab media that represented it, Al Jazeera’s approach to news media includes controversial coverage of contentious Arab issues. This approach works towards establishing, Marc Lynch argues, “the possibility of disagreement, the simple and essential lesson that policy disagreements need not necessarily mean excommunication from a community of identity.” In seeking out and sometimes shaping the Arab perspective of the 21st century, Al Jazeera understands that this perspective is rarely singular. And so the network seeks to represent, and to legitimize, viewpoints that are often in direct opposition. On Al Jazeera English, talk show hosts fire off tough questions about the responsibility of other Arab leaders for Saddam Hussein’s humanitarian crimes. An anchorman grills the Syrian ambassador to the United States about the possibility of a covert Syrian nuclear program. A report on 40-year prison sentences for Muslim brotherhood members complains bitterly that the Mubarak government referred the civilian defendants to military courts, and that family members and defense lawyers were banned from the trials; a member of Egypt’s National Democratic Party appears to defend the government, and a formerly imprisoned Muslim Brotherhood member calls in to protest not just the proceedings but the entire ethos of detaining opposition members.

These are the kinds of uncomfortable conversations that Al Jazeera goes out of its way to facilitate, proving by example that “Arabs can disagree and still be Arabs” (Lynch). Many of Al Jazeera’s programs have adopted the strategy of pitching polar extremes against each other in debate in hopes of opening and enhancing dialogue on particularly contentious issues. Yet this approach sometimes backfires when it leaves the “rational center” of an issue, and the subtleties therein, largely unrepresented. That is to say, when ideologues of opposite poles hammer away at the big questions, details and nuance seem lost.

This was evident in some of the programming I viewed about the current state of Iraq. In one panel moderated by Riza Khan, a Qatari news editor, who argues for continued American presence in Iraq because of Bush’s “responsibility” to “fix what he broke,” squares off with an American professor who counters that Americans will not support a drawn out war in Iraq because the escalating civil war is “your problem, and we did what we could.” (As a side note, the professor came off looking incredibly ignorant, to a point that embarrassed me as an American college student.) The details of these disparate grand designs for the future – time tables, regions, projected costs, neighborhood relations, et cetera – were not discussed, mostly because these panelists just could not break through their grand ideological differences to get to the nitty gritty of actual policy. Such debate is important (and no doubt entertaining), but it needs to be supplemented with the kind of discussions that leave room for subtlety and that address concrete issues, particularly when the subject matter is a current war.

And so the question remains: has Al Jazeera – can Al Jazeera – become a new platform for Arab unity? Certainly, Al Jazeera’s arrival has permanently changed landscape of Arab media and ripped legitimacy away from many complacent, state-based news outlets. And Al Jazeera has done more than almost any other institution to keep the Arab public involved in discussions about its future – this unity, if it succeeds, won’t just be one of statesmen and elites, of mutual enemies and border elisions. Of course, certain dangers remain: Al Jazeera could become another one of many pundit-like Arab news outlets, or alternately, it could become so dedicated to argument that actual reporting falls to the wayside. Yet Al jazeera runs a lot of introspective programming, examining its own role and its own performance in shaping and informing Arab opinion, and occasionally comparing its coverage to CNN, BBC, and the like. As long as Al Jazeera maintains this critical eye, on itself and on everything else, the chances of continued public service to the Arab world, and perhaps the rest of the world, are good. Here’s to hoping.

And a disclaimer: While the themes of this “review” (more of an essay, really) deal mainly with Al Jazeera’s relationship to its Arabic-speaking base, the examples that I’ve cited come from English language broadcasts and articles. I know from experience (having Arabic class assignments of reading AJ’s articles, and trying to move this process along by reading the English language versions of these “same” articles) that Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Original do not report the exact same news, in the exact same manner. They are, in fact, different services, and differences in their coverage range from (translated) vocabulary used and tone implied to sources cited and issues emphasized. I don’t think the disparities are drastic enough to discredit general ideas, formed from watching the English service, on what Al Jazeera broadcasts, and why, and to what end. But it’s something to think about.

Posted by Chantal Berman at 08:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In The Future of Media, a collection of authors from varied backgrounds (the majority as activists) argue against increased media consolidation at the hands of the Federal Communications Commission, promoting grassroots activism to halt a trend that flies in the face of our democratic principles. This trend toward monopoly is nothing new to American business; but it picked up speed in 1996 when Congress passed the Telecommunications Act, drastically relaxing ownership regulations in the media sector and paving the way for corporate hegemonies like Clear Channel’s dominance of the radio waves. In the name of free market competition, deregulation allowed most of the images and sounds seen and heard on a daily basis, all over the world, to fall into the hands of only five major corporations: General Electric, Viacom, News Corporation, Time Warner and Disney. Instead of fostering competition, the act shrank the media industry into an even smaller group of self-interested parties that Robert McChesney, an academic media critic and one of the book’s editors, likens to Hyman Roth’s Havana patio in The Godfather Part II [12]. In 2003, the F.C.C. approved another set of deregulatory measures that would have allowed the media pool to shrink even further, has it not provoked a firestorm of citizen outrage and grassroots activism on both ends of the political spectrum. Several of the essays in The Future of Media describe the democratic fervor whipped up by the F.C.C.’s rule changes, culminating in a series of hearings before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which struck down the changes in 2004.
Each of the authors takes up the mantle of media reform forged in 2003, urging readers to get involved in the “fight to limit conglomerate swallowing of media outlets by sensible limits on multiple and cross-ownership of TV and radio stations, newspapers, magazines, publishing companies, and other information sources,” as Bill Moyers puts it in the book’s introduction [xxi]. The cause of media reform stems from the principle that the media are supposed to balance their financial interests with a concern for their audience, the public, whom they are obligated to inform as well as entertain. As F.C.C. Commissioner Michael J. Copps points out in his essay, “Where is the Public Interest in Media Consolidation?”, broadcast media companies receive their free licenses to use the publicly-owned electromagnetic spectrum in exchange for a pledge to serve the public interest (this system is known as the public-trustee framework, or the public interest standard) [120]. As those media companies join bigger, vertically-integrated corporations, where they are only one of many profit-seeking operations, the public interest loses out to the bottom line.
The problem is not a vast and insidious corporate conspiracy to control the hearts and minds of average Americans—it’s more subtle than that. Corporate emphasis on profit forces out programming that genuinely reflects the makeup and interests of the public in local markets, because selling more ad time means targeting the most commercially coveted demographics and promotes a “lowest common denominator” approach. Funding for informative and locally-geared programming gets cut as corporations consolidate their resources in order to maximize the ratio of revenue to production costs. Corporate honchos are also likely to hire and put on the air people who look and think like them, at the expense of voices of dissent. In the essay “Media Bias: How to Spot It—And How to Fight It,” Peter Hart cites a study conducted by his organization, the media watchdog FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting), which found that 92% of U.S. sources interviewed on network newscasts in 2001 were white and 85% were male [52]. Not surprisingly, corporate representatives were interviewed on the air 35 times more often than representatives of organized labor. FAIR’s study illustrates how the consolidation of media production and distribution runs directly counter to the Supreme Court’s opinion that “the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public” (quoted by Schwartzman, et al. in “The Legal Case for Diversity in Broadcast Ownership,” 153). Furthermore, the media’s conglomeration means that the people in control are increasingly elite, detached by class and culture from the majority of the public they are supposed to serve. If the elites in corporate media join forces with the elites in government, whose interests more closely resemble their own, then the media’s role as the “fourth estate,” a muckraking check on official power, will go out the window.
All of this is particularly scary in our postmodern age, which is so saturated with images and sound bites that there is no escape from mediation. If global media is a crucial node in the current heteropolar political landscape, as this course has argued, then the question of who controls the media is a direly urgent one. If media has the power to compete with governments in mobilizing political action and influencing our values and principles, then what happens when the media falls into the hands of an elite few, driven solely by the interests of free market capital?
Advocates for deregulation insist that the Internet and cable television will make up for the diversity lost in the consolidation of the newspaper and broadcast industries. But in “The Legal Case for Diversity in Broadcast Ownership” in The Future of Media, Andrew Jay Schwartzman, Cheryl A. Leanza and Harold Feld (lawyers who argued the case against the F.C.C. for the Media Access Project in 2003) maintain that the internet is still just a red herring. “Because of the economics of news production, only a handful of websites control the bulk of news generation and distribution over the Internet,” they write. “Although anyone remains free to set up a website and post or send information to the rest of the world, this freedom does not equate with an ability to effectively compete with existing media companies. The question is not whether news is somehow discoverable, but whether it enters into the public’s awareness” [155]. On the surface, this argument seems a little outdated. Political blogs like Talking Points Memo and the Drudge Report existed when the book was published in 2005, but they have only recently risen to prominence as the potential messiahs of 21st century news, especially since TPM received a Polk Award this year for its coverage of the US Attorney scandal. So maybe the Internet already plays a more important role as an alternative news source than it did three years ago. But the authors’ point about public awareness is well taken. Although online news has certainly become more important, it still pales when compared to mainstream news in terms of viewership and cultural permeation. Everyone knows what CNN is (we even have an effect named after it), but it’s unlikely that anybody outside politically well-informed circles has ever heard of TPM. And although the right people might be reading the blogs, allowing the info they dig up to circulate more widely—the US Attorneys scandal is a case in point—they still fail to reach an audience anywhere near as large as those of the network news shows or the 24-hour cable news channels. The other crucial distinction between online news aggregates and the mainstream news is money: no blog has the finances to bankroll the kind of investigative reporting that the media’s fourth estate role entails. Although the aggregation model is gaining traction as a valuable way to compile and distribute good information, the blogs have yet to figure out a reliable means of sustaining themselves financially while expanding their operations. All of which goes to show, yet again, the defects of a media system that depends on the capitalist model.
If traditional television news is still the average American’s main source of information, then who controls the media is just as important today as it was a few years ago. Indeed, as very recent events have proven, the question of media consolidation is not off the table despite reformers’ victory in 2004. In December, the F.C.C. relaxed a ban on ownership of different media in the same market, allowing companies to own one newspaper and one TV station in one city in the top twenty markets, provided that the station is not in the top four and there are at least eight other news sources. The Senate Commerce Committee passed a “resolution of disapproval” on April 24 to invalidate the new policy; but President Bush has threatened to veto the resolution if it passes in the Legislature, and several media titans have already filed a lawsuit against it on the grounds that it violates their First Amendment rights. Cross-media ownership is an especially pressing issue in light of current controversy over one of the world’s biggest media markets, New York City, where Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is on its way to controlling several of the biggest media outlets. Thanks to F.C.C.-granted waivers of the pre-existing cross-media ownership ban, News Corp already owns The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and two television stations, and is in talks to purchase Newsday from the Tribune Company. The sale would put Murdoch’s corporation in control of three of the country’s ten largest papers.
The authors of The Future of Media clearly anticipated in 2005 that the fight for media reform was far from over; the book is presented not as a commemoration of the successes of 2003 but as a primer for concerned citizens and future activists. The back of the book features a 70-page media reform action guide, with step-by-step guides to filing complaints with the F.C.C., monitoring local media outlets, organizing like-minded individuals, and other levels of activism. This call to action echoes what many see as the key strength of alternative news gathering on the internet: putting authority over information into the hands of the people that that information is supposed to serve. In our era of media conglomerates, we need individuals and local groups to keep an eye on policy and production/distribution institutions in the same way that blogs monitor the mainstream news. In order to preserve the fourth estate, we need a grassroots fifth estate to mediate the media.

Sources:
“Murdoch Taking on F.C.C. Media Rule.” Stephen Labaton. The New York Times, April 23 2008.
“Murdoch Closes in on Newsday and Reshapes Journal.” Richard Perez-Pena and Tim Arango. The New York Times, April 22 2008.
“Senate Committee Votes to Overturn F.C.C. Cross-Media Ownership Rules.” Katherine Skiba. US News & World Report, April 24 2008.

Posted by Jessica Kerry at 06:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)