"As of Monday, April 28, there's 95 percent awareness of this movie," boasted its producer, Joel Silver, to Entertainment Weekly weeks before its premiere....It was certainly helped along by Entertainment Weekly itself, an AOL Time Warner publication that ran two cover stories on "The Matrix Reloaded" in a single month....[AOL Time Warner] is the most troubled of the media giants these days - crippled by billions in debt, internecine warfare and a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation for fraud. But even in its weakened state, it has the Herculean resources to fix much of the nation's attention on whatever story it chooses to sell. Its pushing of "The Matrix Reloaded" is a fairly benign use of that enormous power: if you are sucked into a film and don't like it, the worst that happens is that you lose a few hours and the price of a movie ticket....
..."The Matrix Reloaded," playing on a record 8,517 screens, crowded most other movies out of the marketplace last weekend....The media giants took the same tack in banding together to push the administration-dictated narrative of Saddam Hussein - and with the same results. The networks' various productions of "Countdown: Iraq," though as ponderous as "The Matrix Reloaded," were so effective that by the time we went to war, 51 percent of the country, according to a Knight-Ridder poll, believed that Iraqis were among the 9/11 hijackers. It took the bloody re-emergence of Qaeda terrorists in Riyadh two weeks ago to recover the repressed memory that none of the 9/11 terrorists were Iraqis and that most of them were Saudis. And whatever happened to Saddam's arsenal, all those advanced nuclear weapons programs and biological poisons that George W. Bush kept citing as the justification for going to war? Well, sarin today, gone tomorrow. That laundry list of terrors, none of them yet found, vanished from the national consciousness as soon as the cable outlets of AOL Time Warner, Fox and NBC put their muscle behind The Laci Peterson Murder.
The power of the five companies that foster this sequential amnesia is increasing, not declining. In a vote set for June 2, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to relax some of the few ownership restrictions meant to rein them in. Companies like Viacom (which already owns CBS and Paramount) and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (which owns Fox and is on its way to controlling the satellite giant DirecTV) are likely to go on shopping sprees for more TV outlets. But who knows or cares? Though liberal and conservative organizations alike, from Common Cause to the National Rifle Association, are protesting this further consolidation of media power, most of the country is oblivious to it. That's partly because the companies that program America's matrix have shut out all but bare-bones coverage of the imminent F.C.C. action, much as the ruling machines in "The Matrix" do not feed their captive humans any truths that might set them free....
(Frank Rich, "There's No Exit From the Matrix," <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/25/arts/25RICH.html>) *****
Robert McChesney, "The FCC's Big Grab," <http://www.counterpunch.org/mcchesney05162003.html>. John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney, "FCC: Public Be Damned," <http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0516-06.htm>.
-- Yoshie
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>