RB Horkheimer and Adorno

It’s a media-opoly. Ninety percent of TV networks, newspapers, movies, books, cds, and radio stations can be traced back to five corporations (in descending order of control): Time Warner, Disney, News Corporation, Bertelsmann, and Viacom. The US has set a 39% cap on media outlet ownership per corporation.

If former FCC chairman Michael Powell, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom and GE had had there way, the cap would be 45%; in 2003 the FCC decided this was a better percentage than the 35% at the time. A US federal court overturned the decision, but ultimately Congress compromised. Next time the FCC should shoot higher and maybe they’ll break 50%.

“Culture today is infecting everything with sameness” (41), Horkheimer and Adorno wrote in 1944. But that’s not what the CEOs want us to think. In fact, since the time H&A wrote “The Cultural Industry,” we’ve gotten millions of TVs with thousands of channels from which to choose, including (though not a comprehensive list):

—CNN, TBS, TCM, Cartoon Network, TNT, HBO, Cinemax (Time Warner);
—ABC, ABC News, ESPN, ESPN Classics, Disney Channel (Disney);
—Fox, Fox News, FX, National Geographic Channel, Speed Channel, TV Guide Channel
(News Corporation);
—CBS, MTV, VH1, BET, CMT, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon (Viacom).

“For the consumer there is nothing left to classify, since the classification has already been preempted by the schematism of production” (44) write H&A. They were mostly using film to make their point, but today TV (or the internet) seems a more fitting example.

Many TV shows—H&A would probably have said all—are nothing more than tropes used as a distraction in order to focus our attention away from our day jobs as producers and toward our industrial duty as consumers. Wall-TVs may one day be available, like the ones in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Floor-to-ceiling TVs on every wall in the family room.