Can Corporate-Controlled Media Be Considered as Reliable Sources?
I wanted to articulate pertinent issues related to critical media literacy and the contentious issue of how to determine what a reliable media source is. How, for example, should we ‘read’ news that comes out of corporate-controlled and/or publicly-owned news media sources (ex. New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, BBC, CBC, NPR), and can they be considered as reliable sources?
There is a tendency to view mainstream media sources as reliable and I felt it was important to discuss the problems with this because many use them as sources without considering their connections to the ruling class, how they normalize narratives that perpetuate dominant power structures, and support neoliberal political and economic interests.
In the field of critical media literacy, it is accepted knowledge that corporate news media distort, lie, and manufacture consent. They influence the framing of socio-political and economic issues and, largely unaware of this, many draw on them as ‘reliable’ sources to make sense of the world around them. Their narratives become normalized and largely unquestioned. (Marmol, 2021)
The narratives that are manufactured/disseminated/ignored/silenced serve to protect the interests of the ruling class, which in today’s neoliberal world is the billionaire class, and who also happen to be the owners of corporate-controlled media. They hire and fire staff, decide budgets, and make final editorial decisions behind closed doors that get trickled down to the writing staff who learn to toe the line (Marmol, 2021). Is it fair to say that all journalists in corporate media just go along with the propagation of dominant ideologies that serve the interests of the billionaire/ruling class?
According to a reporter who worked for CBS:
“Higher-ups would never offer editorial staff direct input on content. That’s what the executive and middle management were for. Would these managers confide to their staff that the big guns gave them a certain direction? No. Whatever it was, they would present it as their own, and it would be adopted.
Within this culture, controlling the content goes on in whispers, frowns, headshakes and decisions made behind closed doors.”
What about publicly-owned media? They are not as neutral as we would like to believe and who is hired onto the board of directors is critical. Take for example the CBC scandal last year when they were found to have deleted the word ‘Palestine’ (http://bit.ly/3j0gXIB). Or the BBC’s pro-war stance on Iraq in 2003: “an academic analysis [showed] the corporation displayed the most “pro-war” agenda of any broadcaster” (http://bit.ly/2YnKkvc). These are not neutral stances, let alone stories that advance social justice issues.
So how do we digest a story say from the New York Times? It’s not all blatant lies and complete disinformation, is it? Of course not. Within all misinformation and disinformation are kernels of truth, some bigger than others. But how do we know which bits are true?
Emil Marmol (Ph.D. candidate in critical race theory at the University of Toronto, OISE) suggests that we find alternative media sources that are counter-hegemonic, not corporate-owned, and do not rely on advertising or some type of corporate funding (2021). Their organization should be democratically structured and operated, and their content should speak up for the larger population, particularly the marginalized. Now once we find those sources, we should ask how their story on a similar topic compares to the corporate-controlled one. Here we may begin to find the truth.
Some alternative media suggestions from Marmol include:
https://www.projectcensored.org
Marmol, E. (2021). Nine Key Insights: For a Robust and Holistic Critical News Media Literacy. In Hoechsmann, M, Thésée, G, & Carr, P. (Eds), Education for Democracy 2.0, (285–311) Brill: Leiden.