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  The Society for Consumer Advocates and Mavens

News You Can Use!

FREEDOM AND COMMERCIAL VIRUS

Corporate conglomerates use their First Amendment legal rights to shape elections and the content of the news media. Their control over the media outlets and news organizations helps protect their "right" to advertise, and critics charge, allows the corporations to sell potentially harmful, even deadly products to unsuspecting consumers.

Corporations are perceived to have rights and powers that go well beyond those of common folks, which some complain is the corruption of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Today's "commercial information virus", spread by corporate attitude and policies, inhibits the free flow of ideas, unlike what the citizenry may like to believe. First, corporations turn up the "noise level" in the information dispensing system, often doing as much to keep the public confused instead of enlightening the public with healthy ideas. This "filtering" of news and information is crucial to inhibiting freedom and the free flow of ideas.

The final blow to freedom is when corporate conglomerates block citizen access to putting forth alternative ideas and perspectives via media outlets. Commercial advertising by corporations is the virus that keeps the freedom of ideas from getting access to radio and TV news organization airwaves in too many cases. It also corrupts newspapers and news magazines, and if left unchecked, can in many ways corrupt the whole global communications infrastructure when it comes to the "free" flow of ideas.

The citizenry needs commercial virus protection, possibly a "Media Carta", so to speak, which guarantees the rights of all citizens to allow them to buy commercial airtime or advertisements ensuring the public has an opportunity and outlet to "speak their piece", if you will. This may allow potential true freedom of speech and possibly even help breakup the monopoly of ideas that corporations now hold over the public.

To date, cyberspace is the only frontier left untouched by corporate control, but conporte-controlled legislators seek to force cyberspace into going more toward the way of TV, meaning reasserting democratic dominion over the mental commons!

Citizens need the "right to access" and the "right to communicate" through all media outlets which control the publicly owned airwaves. These "rights" should be fundamental citizen rights. The eventual battle for something like a "Media Carta" will be the great freedom fight of the Information Age.

Some un-advertisements or promotions you will NOT likely see over the airwaves owned by corporate conglomerates are "Turn Off TV Week" and "Buy Nothing Day", as well as ads for "ecological economies" and ad campaigns claiming that "TV violence may be hazardous to your health!" These could be some of the potentially most powerful social marketing or advertising campaigns to alert or wake up the public that have ever been produced or even suggested--but you may likely never see them promoted and/or sustained for any substantial length of time over the public airwaves owned by corporate conglomerates.

SUPPLEMENTAL SOURCE: ADBUSTERS MAGAZINE FALL 1997

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