The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh

The global village is not what it was made out to be. The rich, the middle class, and many poor people around the world consume the same media products from a handful of huge multinational corporations based in the West. The effect is pernicious.

Edward S. Herman, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, and Robert W. McChesney, journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin, take a look at the major corporate players in this new information age. These firms not only provide goods and services but propagate an entire worldview, the authors argue.

"The global media are the missionaries of our age, promoting the virtues of commercialism and the market loudly and incessantly through their profit-driven and advertising-supported enterprises and programming," the authors write. "This missionary work is not the result of any sort of conspiracy.... It developed organically from their institutional basis and commercial imperatives."

Today, a two-tiered grouping of large firms dominates the world communications system, the authors report. The first tier consists of ten megacorporations, including some well-known names like Time Warner (the largest in the world, with annual sales approaching $25 billion), Disney, and GE. Others are not so recognizable, including Viacom, Polygram, TCI, and even the Rupert Murdoch-controlled News Corporation, which the authors call "the archetype for the twenty-first century global media firm."

The second-tier consists of some three dozen smaller firms, hankering for tie-ups with each other and with the real bigwigs. Many are newspaper companies, including Dow Jones, The New York Times Co., The Washington Post Co., Gannett, and the Tribune Co.

The domination of the information flow by a few large firms is profoundly undemocratic, the authors contend. The pressure to make profits and serve advertisers leads companies to disregard public service and hype entertainment and violence. As the authors put it in their introduction, "Such a concentration of media power in organizations dependent on advertiser support and responsible primarily to shareholders is a clear and present danger to citizens' participation in public affairs, understanding of public issues, and thus to the effective working of democracy."

As Herman and McChesney point out, the threat to the free flow of expression comes not only from government censorship, as is often supposed. Rather, private commercial ownership of the media imposes...