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US Elections
Voter Apathy? American Democracy Functioning As Intended by J. Conrad Guest Fully two-thirds of voting age Americans shun the polls each November in which a National election takes place. Not surprising, that number is much higher for Congressional election years and for Primary and local elections. The media would have us believe that voter apathy is due to the decline of party politics, dirty campaigns, a disenfranchised underclass, an indolent electorate, and television. Yet these same commentators say little of campaign finance reform's affect on the "purchase" of governmental access, nor do they acknowledge their own role in driving voters away from their duty, for to do so would be to admit that the government misdirects we, the people, for whom they are elected to represent in preference for corporate interests. Noam Chomsky, one of this country's leading dissident political scholars (yet, not surprising, his political work is better known outside the U.S.) has written of government misdirection and how corporate interests control the media in an effort to control the people. Chomsky suggests that Democracy is no longer a right to choose between candidates or parties, but is instead a right to choose among commodities. Corporations would rather the common man accept their subordinate lives in pursuit of the ever-elusive American dream, perhaps best defined today as consumption, and leave the task of managing their own affairs to those who serve and administer power. Thomas Patterson, director of Harvard University's Vanishing Voter Project, reports that today "Americans' feeling of powerlessness has reached an alarming high." When asked, "How much influence do you think people like you have on what government does?" an astounding 53 percent responded, "only a little" or "none." The previous peak, 30 years ago, was 41 percent. According to James Madison, our nation's fourth president and "Father of the Constitution," our constitutional system was designed to "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." Madison believed that political power must reside in the hands of the "wealth of the nation," men who can be trusted to "secure the permanent interests of the country"-the rights of the propertied-and to defend those interests against the "leveling spirit" of those who "labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings." If one agrees with Madison's elitist thinking, an argument can be made that our government is functioning today as it was designed to function, more than two centuries ago, and furthermore, that our most recent presidential election reflects a triumph for American democracy. Corporate America's Influence on the Media Control of the masses in a Totalitarian system is simple: dissenters are merely silenced by force. In a democracy, however, since ruling decisions are based on information, consider disinformation to be the raison d'être of those in power. Ben Bagdikian is a media critic, the former Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley, and author of The Media Monopoly. According to Bagdikian, in 1982, 50 corporations controlled at least half of media business in this country. Before the decade was over, mergers and takeovers had cut that number to 23. Many Wall Street analysts had predicted that a mere half dozen corporations would control most of the media before the new millennium. Fortunately the Internet has slowed this trend, at least temporarily, by opening vast resources for public access (see Internet of the People for additional reading). In a 1980 survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, fully 1/3 of editors employed by newspaper chains said they would not feel free to publish news stories that might damage their parent company. In this new order, it can then be construed that, to conform to the unspoken customs of the corporate workplace, the American press prefers self-censorship to heavy-handed institutional suppression. The press likes to promote itself as autonomous and dispassionately objective, but according to Bagdikian, journalists are, to varying degrees, influenced and constrained by their corporate bosses as subordinates conform to their owner's ideas. Case in point: the Congressional tumult over raising taxes on the rich during Bill Clinton's first term. Arguing the concept of class war and heavier tax burdens for the rich and ignoring history-the progressive revolt before World War I and higher tax rates for the rich as recently as the 1970s-the news media peremptorily dismissed a legitimate political option, and why not, since most news media are owned by interlocking corporations? Is it any surprise then, that, as television networks and the major newspapers have come to dominate the information dissemination business, the scope of political debate has diminished, and with it, election returns? In Unreliable Sources, authors Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon state that "news in America acts as a hazy defoliant, stripping away substance." And concerning coverage of current events, "the media blanket is more opaque than translucent-smothering issues rather than ventilating them." Ben Bagdikian says it in perhaps more frighteningly truthful terms: "If a nation has narrowly controlled information, it will soon have narrowly controlled politics." One has only to look at the trend of politics in this country for the last 20 years to note how narrow the control has truly become. About the Author(s): See under Our Contributors to find out about the Author(s) of this article. |
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