Mediaboss Marketing

Azly Rahman

Thinking of the still missing Malaysian airplane, contemplating on a Marxist theory of informational diffusion, I came up with these random notes on media oligopoly I am sharing in this weeks column:

Information wants to be free and wishes to leave the shackle of control and the kingdom of officialdom.

Marx once said that whoever owns the means of production owns/controls (re: Vladimir Lenins classic essay on commanding heights,) and control the production of consciousness, and further controls the evolution of the act of knowing and the contents of what is to be known because what is known is produced as artifacts with politics of control structuring them.

CNN, the media empire of Rupert Murdoch, Time-Warner AOL, and media corporations controls the production of what is to be known, albeit appearing to be producing objectivity hidden under the shibboleth of liberal-democracy whilst in essence governed by the hegemony of the tightly-controlled news and informational oligarchic empire of consciousness-production.

This might sound like a (Noam) Chomskyian analysis of the post-modern, post-information age paradigm of media production re: the reporting of the missing MH370. It could as well be a Chomskyian view in need of a further work of deconstructionism.

There are classes of control of knowledge-production and those producing information in the ongoing reporting of MH370.

Those who know the whereabouts of the aircraft, such as leaders of the game, such as presidents and prime ministers playing the role of chief-of-staff of armed forces, etc. in collaboration with the warrior-commander-Kshatriya class and the most elite of the intelligence unit and working in tandem and alliance with military and supra-intelligence allies, the secret must be kept (from Edward Snowden (right) or Julian Assange) as long as the national and international security is safeguarded the plot must be kept intact and the show must go on

Those who know the unsealed part of the story and will be playing the role of making sure the world and the public knows whats happening, in the name of freedom to know and freedom to profit from conflict or even the manufacture of conflict. The philosophy of news-reporting is simple: live and breathe the paradigm of liberal-capitalist informational democracy through sound-bite and blitzkrieg- technologies of cognitive dissonance and funnel in as much as possible issues versus non-issues and speculations and half-truths to feed the four-eyed viewers who are starved for information and drowned in speculations.

Thats the role of the media, whether in America or in Malaysia. The longer one gets glued to the TV, the higher the ratings, the more big advertisers will pour in money.

See the original post here:
Of Marxist media theory and MH370